clicker train my cat

... and he’s making very good progress:

_{Day 1: Association of click with treat only.
Day 2: Paw raise. (A bit hesitant)
Day 3: Paw raise (success).
Day 4: Touch my clicking hand with paw (didn’t happen!).
Day 5: Touch my outstretched finger of my clicking hand with paw (success).
Day 6: Touch with nose the eraser end of a pencil (success)}

A really excellent source of support & information about feline clicker training is the Yahoo Group on the subject

This goal is a subset of another of my goals so I have some duplication in my list. I’d rather use the other goal as it deals with training my cat & stimulating his intellect in general rather than just with clicker. As I have successful trained my cat to do a few things I’m marking this as completed.

That was several years ago. In that time he seems to have slumped a bit. I get the impression that he’s capable of far more & that he’d like to be mentally stimulated. I’ve been thinking of trying clicker training on him for a while.

Yesterday I bought a clicker device. I want to get genned up on using this & plan it out carefully before I start. I think that’s important because using the clicker in a less effective way at the start could lead my cat to make the wrong associations with the clicker. For example, I need to be sure my cat is hungry enough at the time to want the treats otherwise he’ll not be associating the clicks with something desirable. [Cat says: When that thing clicks I’m given something boring. I’ll ignore the clicks.]

There are several practical problems I can imagine. For example, what if I’m training my cat to jump on the chair. Let’s say that in 4 clicks I get him to walk 4 steps toward the chair & touch it. Great. Then my cat loses interest and only moves one step toward the chair. Do I click+treat for this even though it’s a backward step or would that spoil the whole thing?

The clicker device came with a 4 page training guide which isn’t enough. I’ve ordered a book on the subject & there is a wealth of information on the internet about it including some very good videos of people clicker training their cats.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Cat-Clicker

has some good info and pointers.

It’s a slow process.