How to Teach Your Cat to Come

Video Transcript

"Hi we are here today with Little Bit and we are going to talk about teaching your cat to come. I think teaching your cat to come is absolutely bottom line the most important thing you can possibly teach a cat. The reason is if you have your cat on a good come command and your house is on fire you can call that cat and the cat will come to you automatically, you can lift it up and take it out of the house or if you have an indoor cat that really has absolutely no sense about the outdoors if the cat gets out you can call it and it will come. So the way that we teach the cat to come, I have basically when we are doing our training session I have a few tools that I like to use. These are freeze dried chicken treats. There are a bunch of different companies that make freeze dried chicken treats. This is the treat that gets most cat's attention. Your cat may prefer a little flake of tuna, maybe a little spoonful of its favorite wet cat food or little tiny minced bits of fresh chicken, whatever the treat is that really motivates your cat, that's the treat that you want to save for events like this. And then of course they have the clicker. The idea behind the clicker is that it is a very unique sound and what you are doing is you are using the clicker to mark the moment that the cat does what you want so the cat can learn to recognize oh, o'kay when I do that very think she rewards me because that is the thing that she is asking for. The hand gesture that I like to use is this because I can do this with or, because hand gestures are a really important part of training your cat so you are using the voice command but you are also using the hand gesture. So what I like to do is I can put the treat in the hand like this and then she can take the treat from my hand but at another time when I want to call her like if I want to call her to my bed and I don't have a bunch of treats handy if I do this and I call her she recognizes it. It sort of reinforces the request because you can't really call it a command for the cat. I'm going to call her and you want to have the call be consistent every time. I am going to call her Little Bit, come, Little Bit, come and when she touches my hand I'm going to click and let her have that treat. Good girl, good girl, yea, yea that's a very good kitty. So as soon as she is finished her treat we will go ahead and throw the mouse and repeat. That was kind of a big treat because really what I like to do is you really want to give them a small treat so they are really just getting a little bit of a treat and not so much like a big snack. Now let's see if we can distract her, go get the mouse, go get the mouse, hmm not nearly as excited as the treat. Little Bit, come, see that, go get the mouse, go get the mouse and see now what I am going to do I am not even going to have a treat in my hand. Little Bit, come good girl, good girl. So she is responding just to the hand command."