This doesn’t need a long stupid setup, does it?
Oh, all right. I’ll spoiler-space it, though, so no one needs to bother with it, and frankly I urge everyone to ignore it anyway.
On the other hand, I simply can’t be arsed. Just answer the question. Wisecracks, anecdotes, and cute kitten pictures encouraged. Not puppy pictures, though, on account of me hating dogs.
Some, possibly most house-cats can learn simple tricks if you’re patient and diligent enough. It really depends rather less on intelligence per se ( which at any rate is even harder to measure in animals than in people ), as in motivations. Most cat trainers in circuses depend very heavily on treats, as many cats will go the extra mile for something particularly tasty, once they get the idea down.
Dogs ( most dogs ) also appreciate food motivators, but are easier to train because they have a much more defined hierarchical social system that makes them eager to please the alpha ( hopefully the owner/trainer ). Cats do have hierarchies, but they are much more diffuse and fluid. Some individual cats may be eager to please their owners, but for most it is more a matter of conditioning by casting tricks as part of play time and offering rewards for successful performance.
I taught my cat to sit. It wasn’t hard. Damn cute too.
With a dog you can eventually phase out treats completely, to where the dog will do it only for your praise or for the click-praise, if you use operant conditioning (aka “clicker training”). You can never, ever do this with a cat - you have to maintain intermittant rewards. This cheeses some people off for some reason.
But cats are trainable as long as the trainer is sufficiently consistent and methodical. There’s a pretty cool video of a guy teaching his cat to flip a light switch using operant conditioning.
Option four should be They’re too goddamn cool, of course. Sorry, I let Mrs. Which type it. 
I had a cat, Penelope, who I taught to sit up and beg for a treat. Eventually she got lazy and if I asked her to sit up, she’d just barely move her head up and then expect the treat. She still got the treat.
Cat’s aren’t stupid; that’s dogs. What cats are, is evil. You think that’s love? To them you’re a space heater. And possibly an itch-scratcher. And a food source. That’s it.
You left out slave and pawn in their scheme for global domination, so I assume your own cat was looking over your shoulder when you typed that.
I had two over the years that played fetch of some sort.
First takes a bit of explanation. As a teen I grew up in a house with a slightly odd build. First floor living room was open, and up against the wall were some stairs that went up to the second floor. The second floor was an open front, above the living room with a wooden railing. Like a hallway with no wall on the living room side.
My at the time kitten Justice would sit up on the balcony part overlooking us in the living room. I was tossing a ball up in the air, she swiped at it. Tried the same thing with a coin, which she could catch in her paws. Eventually she would catch it, put the coin in her mouth, and when I called her she would run down the stairs to the base and give me the coin, then run back up and wait for it to be thrown again. Repeat as long as we were amused. My biggest regret is that we didn’t have a video camera to record it.
Second cat would play the normal fetch and retrieve with a mouse toy, like a dog.
I think it just depends on the cat and human working on it.
Apparently, some people can train cats. This isn’t the video I was thinking of, but nevertheless:
I voted you forgot because really most cats are too smart to pander to your trick requests when they can just demand food and you WILL comply.
I took the kids to see an animal show a few months ago, and some of it was pretty much a cat circus. They were all ordinary housecats rescued from shelters. The guy explained that he gets a cat and watches it to see what it likes to do. If a cat likes to jump around, he can get that cat to do jumps for treats. But the other cat that likes to do something else gets trained for a different trick that suits it. (Even so, the cats were clearly more independent-minded than the dogs.)
So: cats are mostly too aloof to want to learn tricks, but they often can do so if you work with their personalities.
Cats just don’t care. They aren’t driven by the need for approval.
Cats are always out for themselves. It’s not stupid or smart, but a cat only does what he wants to do. A dog will try to please the alpha dog (i.e., you), but a cat doesn’t care about things like that.
So, basically, when you try to train a cat to do tricks, the cat is thinking “what’s in this for me?” If he can’t accomplish anything he wants (usually food), he’s not interested in wasting his time.
Yes they can learn tricks. They usually just cant be bothered with them. Like our cat has learned to roll over. He just isn’t always in the mood for it.
IMHO, stupidity is a good trait in a cat. Smart cats get into trouble. Dumb cats just lay there and shit.
You can train dogs. Cats train you.
Exactly how I voted and why.
“Dogs have owners. Cats have servants.”
A couple of years ago I adopted a 7-year-old solid black cat from the shelter. As I was filling out the papers, one of the employees asked me whether I had seen the cat’s “happy dance.” I said no, and he said “you will.” It didn’t take long to realize that when the cat was happy and wanted attention, he would lie down on the floor, on one side, for about 10 seconds. Then he rolls onto the other side for about 10 seconds. He goes back and forth, watching me the entire time.
I assumed it was just some strange thing he made up . . . until my partner pointed out that he previous owner probably taught him to “play dead.”
247rep.com - Toutes les réponses à vos questions ! Dominique has had a trained house cat show on the sunset docks at Key WesT for over 20 years. He trains rescues . he does an act that includes them jumping through flamiing hoops and several other tricks, singly and in groups.
My uncle trained their cat in a mealtime routine. The cat would come to him and lie on its back, paws in the air. He would then ask “Are you hungry? Do you want some breakfast/lunch/dinner?” and it had to meow after both questions to get fed. I saw the trick in action for years. The cat was quite a tubster, so obviously it knew what was expected of it.
My parents have 2 cats. One of them I think could learn tricks but wouldn’t want to. The other is dumb as a post and still doesn’t understand “NO!” after 2 years. She jumps up on the scanner and sticks her face behind the lid (maybe 1" high) and thinks she’s hidden from view because she can’t see us. She can’t kill bugs on the floor, she just pokes at them and watches in bemusement as they scurry away from her (and the other cat eats them). Adorable, sweet little animal, but she wouldn’t last 8 hours outdoors.