There’s something about teaching an old dog tricks, and it is actually the same for old cats. If you want to train a cat, then let us imitate you as though you are our mothers. When we get older, it’s harder for us to change our ways and learn new things. Afterall, we cats are extremely independent as we have a mind of our own. Hence, teach the kittens early.

Shouting and growling at us will not work. It’s just like shouting at your own kid to do his Mathematics. He won’t want to do them. You need to make learning fun. Try to let we cats trust you. With trust, we will try to do what you want. Speak softly, give encouragement and reward us.

Cats love praise, and teaching them that they will get more from doing something that you want them to do, will ensure that they will be more inclined to obey you for the reward.

If you do have to reprimand your cat, don’t use its name when doing so as you don’t want it to associate its name with something that might upset it. We are very sensitive about our names.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Behaviour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.