Cat Door and Door Bell 

Previously we looked at how quiet cats could be, or how cats could be trained to master some special skills. The skills may work well as far as they stay indoors. But how about if they are active and outgoing cats? Some cats simply love to move around, and for some household, they even walk from doors to doors, or from windows to windows, to go in and out of the rooms and even the house. In such cases, it would be important for the cats to know how to get in. Why? Because it is easy to get out, but not so easy to get in, unless they know some tricks to do this.

As mentioned in another article, cats learn by observing and imitating. If there are lever handles on the door, they would soon learn to open a door or window by pulling or push down the handles in order to get in or out. However, some of the doors are installed with the kind of handles, such as door knobs, that cats cannot handle with their paws the way we do as humans. In some occasions, the doors do not even have an extruding handle; they are sliding doors.

In such cases, there are two things we can do to let cats in and out easily. One way is to introduce a cat door. Another way is to train them to use a special device especially for them: cat door bell.

Cat Door

Cat door is one way to help active cats in and out easily. There are two ways to have cat doors. One way is to buy it from pets shop, and install it at a specific location(s) of the house for the cats to walk in and out. In this manner, we would need to let the cats know the existence of the cat door and train them to use it. One obvious advantage of ready-made cat doors is that it saves our effort of making one ourselves. However, its drawback is probably that they are not tailor-made to suit our particular need for our house and for our cats.

Therefore, another way is to make our own cat doors. This requires some little craftsmanship, but it does not require very tricky skills to make one. The first step to make a cat door is to cut a hole on the door. The size of the hole is supposed to fit the cat that can pass through it comfortably. The hole is normally at the bottom of the door, where cats walk on the ground.

If we can afford to add some design on the cat door, we can consider having a square shape or dome top to make the door a bit more good-looking. If for some reason (such as security and/or privacy) it is not good to leave a hole, however good-looking, between two rooms, we can add a flipping door on the hole.

The flipping door can be made with light and tough material, such as plastic or wooden plate. The door can be hinged at the top and the cats can be trained to simply walk through the door by gently pushing the door upward. In this case, make sure that the hinge is flexible enough for the door to be pushed in both inward and outward direction, and for the cats to push without much force.

Installing a flipping door hinged at the top is more preferable than on either side for two reasons. First, the cats can move head on when walking towards the door without having to care about knocking on it with uneven force. Imagine we open a narrow door without our hands when it is opened on the right or on the left. Our force in the middle will make it more difficult to open. This is the same for cats. However, we do not need to worry about turning the door upward with much force, because the situation would be much easier for the cats.

Second, the top-hinged door ensures that the door is always closed once the cats pass through the door.

In order for the cats to recognize the door easily, apart from our training, we can add some mark on the door to make it easily noticeable by, for example, adding some dotted line near the side and bottom edges of the cat door. Alternatively, we can simply add an interesting mark across the door. Just make sure to avoid adding any picture that may arouse cats’ intention to stay or attack, such as cats’ food or their favourite toys. Just keep in mind, the goal of the doors are for them to walk in and out, not to make them stay or damage the door unnecessarily.

If we need more than one cat door within the house, we may need to consider having different marks or designs on the doors in order to help the cats to distinguish where is which door to avoid confusion.

To train the cats to use the cat doors, we need to first leave the cat doors open and tempt cats to pass through the hole with toys or food. It takes only a few times for the cats to be aware that they can go in and out of the hole. Then, show them how to use the doors by flipping the doors upwards and downwards in both directions. This way, they will notice that they can pass through it whenever they wish.

Door Bell

In some occasions, however, cat door is not possible because the door is made of metal, or the house is in some cold climate regions, when the change of seasonal weather would damage the door. In this case, door bell would help.

It is simple to install a door bell and to train the cats to use it. First, get a small bell that is loud enough for the family to hear that around the house. Swing the bell from a string or cord right outside the door. Make sure the string or cord is hanged low enough for the cats to reach. Once it is fixed, show the cats several times how it works until we find the cats understand what is going on. Sometimes we may need to add some catnip to the bell to attract the cats.

At the beginning, we might need to keep showing the bell in front of the cats whenever they go out or come in. This helps them to associate the bell with the door being opened for them.

During the training, it would be a good idea to have them ring the bell outside the closed door by pulling the string or cord, and give them a reward when we open the door. This will give the cats the impression that they have done something worth rewarding, thus reinforcing them to do the same thing whenever they might need to go in by pulling the string or cord.

Once this association is made in the cats, we do not need to worry that their bell ringing may not have answer either because we are not around or for some other reasons. However, this situation may be rare because normally we are not supposed to let the cats out the door with the door bell without us opening the door for the cats.