Most cats don’t consider us worthy, and think we don’t have anything good enough for them to be arsed with it. Or we just don’t speak the same language.
Certain cats though, can be taught. I have one that sits up and begs, plays fetch, and lets us cradle her upside in our arms like a baby while we drop treats into her mouth.
She also stretches up and waves at me several times a day to get me to notice her.
When she was tiny, we had to put a harness on her and tie her to the pig…or in our case, a piggy bank to teach her basic manners like jumping onto people’s full dinner plates would not be tolerated around here.
Of my three cats, two have learned tricks. My tortie kitten plays fetch – but she sort of trained herself to do that and doesn’t need a treat for reinforcement.
My Ragdoll learned to sit up and beg with very little reinforcement apart from scritches and praise - of course, I do usually give him a treat for his efforts.
Having grown up with cats, I think it’s dependent on the cat. Some (a minority) want to please their owners. The rest kind of just don’t care so much but might be swayed with food.
Many cats get trained. Many cats are intractable. The vast majority of cats, however, will never be assessed. Cats aren’t too stupid to train; cat owners, OTOH…
Our cat figured out how to steal food by opening the fridge with his head. We got blamed multiple times for leaving the door open till we finally caught him doing it.
On the other hand we reversed the door and he never figured that out, he tried for ages afterwards to open it on the wrong side.
The problem is that most people teach using praise, which works for dogs because they value that, while cats don’t. If you train them with food, it will work It’s not a matter of intelligence, but of priorities.
Still, I don’t think the people think they aren’t trainable because they don’t like cats, so I went with the final option.
My little cat squeak plays fetch sometimes. He figured it out on his own. He’ll sometimes bring me toys which I am to throw. He’ll bring them back until hes bored.
All of my cats have learned to pat my leg to get my attention. Spook in particular is 99% non verbal so gesturing is important to him.
I’ve taught a cat to come when I ring a small bell, but I never felt it was trained. I always felt that it came because it knew it was me & wanted to play.
A raven-haired beauty climbs on top of me every night, just to stare into my eyes. In the morning, she’ll put her bare feet on my back as I’m dressing. Then she’ll climb into my lap and do her best to make me late for work.
Usually, that’s by chewing on my shoe laces and purring loudly. Some cats are like that…
I saw a Russian cat circus when they came to town. It wasn’t bad, but the tricks were definitely less complicated than what a well-trained dog could do.
I love my cat, but she’s really quite stupid. Adorable, but stupid. I can’t imagine her learning a trick - I’m slightly amazed she mastered the litterbox.
Our cat used to use our screen door (of the sliding glass door) as a substitute scratching post. To teach him not to do so, my Dad would pick him up and throw him out the door every time he caught him at it. It worked with very few repetitions: whenever the cat wanted to go outside he’d scratch the screen door.
I think the relevant answer is that cats are not pack animals and therefore have different motivations. They have less innate interest in ‘reading’ people and getting our approval. Therefore it can be harder to sell the cat on the idea that there’s any particular reason for the cat to give a shit about what you’re trying to train the cat to do.
Both our cats - one damn smart, one dumb as a hammer - come when called. In fact, the stupider one comes faster and more consistently, even if she’s sound asleep in another room. I’ve also known one or two cats who played fetch as well as any dog.
It’s a motivation thing, and also, there seems to be as wide a variety among cats as among dogs re: intelligence level. My two cats are the equivalent of having a border collie cross, and a yellow lab. Except that I don’t have to take them out into the rain when they have to poop.
I’ve had a number of cats, and their intelligence ran the gamut. My cat Liberty was so smart it was almost spooky. He once built his own litter box out of a shoebox and Kleenex.
But another cat of mine, Rasputin, only had two tiny little brain cells in his skull that would rattle around and clop together occasionally, but not often. For fun, I would put a treat into the middle of a laundry basket, and watch him spend ten minutes trying to grab the treat through the basket netting instead of jumping over into the wide open basket, even though he had just watched me put the treat through the huge opening.
I had a friend who was able to train her cats to do tricks like open cabinet doors to get treats. My cats, on the other hand, learned to do this by themselves. Two of my cats like to jump up onto the top of my kitchen cabinets. One of them, with no encouragement from me, figured out that if he steps down from the top of the cabinet to the top of the built-in microwave he can open the door of the cabinet next to it and then step across onto the top shelf of the cabinet, let the door close behind him, and curl up for a quiet nap. It was rather startling the first time I opened that cabinet to find him there.
Both my cats come when called. Not when I call their names but:
My cat comes when I say, ‘Hey, baybee!’ in a singsong voice. If she is two floors away, it might take a couple of calls and she sort of rolls her eyes at me when she arrives but she still comes.
My cat’s cat (the one I obtained to keep my cat company) comes when you rub your thumb on your fingers. She can hear it from one floor away (if she is in the basement and I am on the second floor, I have to go downstairs to ‘call’ her).
They get lots of attention when they come (neck scratchies mostly) and are big sucks so it works great. (Well, for me, anyway, they won’t come for anyone else. Drives my husband batty.)
I am pretty sure I could train my cat to do other stuff, too but she is, of course, perfect just as she is.
