Train a cat

Some cats lovers may not need to train their cats for toileting because they find the use of litter box good enough, and they do not mind cleaning the litter box. Some cat lovers may think that it is best to keep cats as natural as they are. All they want is to have their cats to be a well-behaved, so that they would do something and not to do something else.

To train the cats, we need to know how they learn. They probably do not understand our language. Nor do they read. They learn by experience. They will repeat something if the experience is nice, and avoid doing something in the future if the experience is unpleasant.

Actually, as we have shown some examples in other articles, cats will stop scratching the furniture if there is spray or sticky tape. They will eat more wet food if we treat them with some fish. The point here is to reward the cats for the behaviours we want them to have, and remove the reward and make it unpleasant for the behaviours we do not want them to have.

Nocturnal Cats

One major issue would be cats’ nocturnal behaviours. Cats are by nature nocturnal, and as mentioned in “How much do cats sleep normally?“, cats can sleep 13 to 18 hours a day, and it is normal for them to sleep during the day and become active at night. Sometimes we may find it annoying for cats to scratch the door or door post or meow when we are supposed to be sleeping, and they jump on us before dawn when we are still asleep. So, how to make their normal habits sound normal to us as well?

In the latter example, some cat lovers may be nice to sooth their cats by getting up and feed the cats, play with them or let them outside, thinking that the cats may be lonely and need some accompany. The situation here is that the cats would find this pleasant the way we respond to them, and it is likely that they would do the same in the future, and that means one day they would probably be able to replace our alarm clock, which is set earlier then we expect.

Unless we can adjust our daily sleeping schedules by going to bed earlier, we will find it a problem to us, because the cats would treat our responses as encouraging reward that would reinforce them to do the same thing nearly every morning. In the worse case, it not only happens early in the morning, sometimes they would do this in the middle of the night, when we are supposed to be deeply asleep.

Of course, some people may choose to punish the cats for this “annoying” behaviour. It would be undesirable not only because we are simply punishing them for following their natural activity schedule, but also frightening them and preventing them from living a normal life pattern, which will gradually present problems and health issues. This is not what we intend.

Day-Night-Shift

A more ideal and practical approach is to train them to shift their active phase gradually from late at night to earlier in the evening to daytime. One way to do this is to engage them with more vigorous activities (such as games). This helps consume their energy and gives them opportunity to exercise. When they feel tired after the activities, they would become quieter and probably will rest soon, roughly at the same time as we do.

Another way is to give them quieter activities before we go to bed, so that their activities will not disturb our sleep. Also, do not let the cats play on our bed or bedroom as the playground. Once they are used to it, it will take some effort to reverse the situation.

If we want to accompany the cats and play with them, it would always be a sweet idea if we can play with them in some activities, whether it is vigorous or quiet ones, whatever that we find suitable for us. As mentioned in “The Conditions and Regularity of Cat Physical Exercise“, there are a lot of activities we can do with the cats. Sometimes we can also shop around cats or pets shop to see any new toys that would be suitable for our cats.

One toy called “Cat Dancer” can be very appealing to most cats. They would be tired in the evening and increase the chance for them to fall asleep at night. As mentioned, cats are accustomed to routines. When we keep our schedules in feeding, playtime and rest time with the cats, they will adjust to it fairly quickly.

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