Cat Training

It's easier than you think, but you have to understand cat psychology

Recently I’ve been training my cat Kali, this is her

As you can see, she’s running in a cat wheel, which I set out to do to get her some exercise. Most people who attempt this fail, so I’ll give some pointers.

The big problem is that most cats, like mine, won’t run in a wheel for fun. Kali does the bare minimum necessary to get a treat. Techniques cats will use to put in less effort include, but are not limited to: Standing and staring at you until you give them a treat. Taking one step and then stopping. Meowing sweetly. Meowing obnoxiously. Filleting your skin with their claws. And Biting you. They’re extremely in tune with which of these techniques work, and it’s very important that you ding them for bad behavior. Even with mostly training her out of all of these things, Kali has learned that the best time to beg for treats by running in the wheel is when I’m on a call and the sound interrupts me. Cats are vastly better exploitative Poker players than us humans, with the only edge we have being understanding the rules of the game.

To train a cat to do anything all positive feedback must be immediate and direct. Negative feedback only works in limited cases for limited things. I’ve been using these treats but lots of others may work and different cats have different tastes. I got Kali started by putting a treat on the wheel for her to come eat it, so get her to even approach the thing and associate it with food. After a few days of that I started holding treats up the sides of the wheel so she’s paw at them and get the wheel to spin in the process. I gave her treats after increasing amounts of wheel spin. She also pawed at my fingers with her claws and I put treats away whenever she started doing that.

As with all training the greatest effect is from just a few minutes per day. Spending hours in a single day doesn’t have anywhere near the same effect.

Of course Kali doesn’t understand that I’m training her to run in the wheel. She thinks she’s training me to give her treats. Since she’s so much better at training than I am I have a routine where I leave her treats in the box and only start going for them when she starts running, and if she stops running while I’m taking out a treat I also stop the treat giving process. It sometimes takes a bit of staring for her to get back with the program.

After Kali figured out that she was supposed to make the wheel spin to get treats I started insisting that she be standing in it while she made the spinning happen. The first few times of this I had to pick her up and put her in it for her to get the hint. Then I started insisting that she start running even before I held a treat in front of her. I still do that at the end because she likes it and it makes her run more, but she can run for a while on her own.

It’s now at the point where a training device would be helpful. Ideally there would be a device with a camera to see when the wheel is spinning with a speaker and a gumball machine type mechanism in it which would play sounds to give the cat positive feedback as she runs and release a treat whenever she’s gone far enough. Ideally it would be paired with a mobile app which would allow the difficulty to be adjusted remotely and give feedback on cat performance and let you know when treats are running low.

You might wonder if this sort of training could work on humans. What do you think we are, some kind of animal?

The wheel I’m using is from onefastcat. Most of the people who get these fail to train their cat to use them so a lot of them get thrown out but oddly the price of used ones isn’t much less than new. They have a common failure mode that a human tries to get in them which breaks one of the two ends. You can easily make one fixed wheel out of two broken ones just by using the two non-broken ends.

The wheel in the picture above I fixed by making a replacement end on my 3d printer. To engineer a wheel to be more robust, you should: Make the part of the ends under the beam go all the way to the floor, add fins to the ends (both done in my replacement part), use two beams underneath instead of one (because the weight tends to alternate between the wheels on one side instead of being balanced across both) and make the wheels be supported on both sides instead of one. A base engineered that way could support the weight of a human without all that much material used and the next bottleneck would be the robustness of the wheel itself.

If you’re less ambitious in your cat training and just want them to be less obnoxious about begging for food the thing to do is to set a timer and always give them the exact same amount of food right after the timer goes off. Once they learn that that’s the routine you can use the very limited negative feedback of spraying them with whater if they whine for food right before the timer happens. Negative feedback just gets cats to stop the unwanted behavior when you’re around, but when the behavior is directed at you and the cat already knows it isn’t doing anything anyway the feedback can be effective.