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Comment by wapz | Hacker News Reader

Don't you have to train your cat almost everyday? And a 2 week break and the cat "forgets" almost everything? I have a cat and dog and I've trained them both. Getting the cat to come to us has been far more difficult than teaching our dog 10+ tricks (and he remembers if we don't do the trick in over a month). After about a week after we stopped giving snacks to our cat when we called her over she decided she doesn't want to come sometimes (and sometimes she came). Anyways, I gave up training the cat because I don't have the time.

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I think it's highly dependent on the cat's personality. We have two, a brother and sister pair. The male cat (Curry) will follow my snapped and pointed finger every time, and responds immediately to voice requests (I use "requests" instead of "commands" intentionally, as any cat owner can attest). If I say "jump down" he'll quickly leave whatever roost he's warming with his bum. His sister Sage, on the other hand, will offer a sassy mew if you snap your fingers at her, and otherwise ignore any requests. She is no less intelligent than her brother, she simply doesn't share his desire to cooperate with her human pets. Curry will also, if he's starved for attention (or out of food, or just bored) come up to me at my computer desk and gently tap-tap-tap on my elbow until I stop what I'm doing and attend to his needs.

Some other interesting activities they've displayed: At night we confine them to their own bedroom in the house, so they aren't constantly scratching at our bedroom door for attention or running up and down the hallway waking us up at 3am. They know when bedtime is, and while Curry is perfectly content to go to bed on his own or with minimal prompting, Sage will find a place to hide before we even realize what time it is. She absolutely refuses to go to bed of her own accord, and we must resort to trickery to get her to go in their room. We can only use the same trick once though; like a Jurassic Park velociraptor, she remembers.

The gourmet food trick worked for a few days but then she would lay her ears back and squint at us as if to say "I see what you're doing there", and run the other way. Next came the catnip-stuffed mouse toy, which she fell for exactly once and never again. Ditto the laser toy; chasing it into the bedroom only to have the door close behind her worked the first time but no more. It seems the only way she will come of her own accord anymore is if we start lavishing her brother with attention; she will come to see what the fuss is about and we'll shut the door behind her. Jealousy in a cat? Perhaps, or just feline curiosity and nothing more.

Wrt the bedtime thing cats are territorial and some will get a lot of anxiety about not being able to access their whole territory for patrol, etc. So if you're putting them in a room at night closed off you may be stressing your cat out and that's why she's fleeing. If I put my cat in a room too long the escape attempts and complaining are epic.

It's not for everybody but I kind of find that "pal, you don't _own_ me" look when my cat knows what I'm asking but doesn't feel like it endearing.

She's definitely the more primal of the pair. She has been known to "drown" her toy mice in their water bowl. My wife finds that particularly disturbing.

We've tried allowing them to run free in the living room and kitchen areas at night, but broken pictures and turned over lamps make that an impossibility (things that they don't do when we're home and awake, oddly enough). Our cats are why we can't have nice things, but we love them anyway.

It turns out cats are really good at intermittent reinforcement, too :)

I don't know about tricks, or teaching cats to go somewhere they don't want to. I do know that it was fairly straightforward to teach our cats that kitchen surfaces are off limits. Taught them when they were ~2-3 months old, and they never forgot. For 20 years.

Same goes for "humans are not climbing posts".

It seems in general easier to train "don't" than "do".

If you "forget" to give the cat any treats, it's not surprising it will "forget" to perform the trick. You're not describing a break. You're describing a period of retraining.

Cats are bastards, you may always have to give a good reward. Not necessarily food, but something. The key to long term training, for cats or humans, is to repeat often, and then gradually lengthen. Don't teach daily for a month and then wait 3 months. Train daily, then weekly, then monthly, etc.

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