I’ve got two, both a year old. Bella’s not as smart as Brixie, but they both play fetch and come when called. I didn’t really train them to do either. The fetching was mostly a mutual human/cat training thing - they’d bring us the ball and drop it near our feet, then we’d pick it up and toss it for them to chase. When they brought it back (which didn’t always happen), we’d do it again. Eventually they (and we) figured out that if they consistently brought it back, we’d consistently throw it again. But we didn’t really teach them to do so.
I think they only come when I call because then they get skritches and love.
My Oliver does this too! I originally thought this meant he wanted me to pet his belly but when I tried he bit me. Both of my kitties are adorable but only Oliver does the happy roll.
This. One of the Bodoni cats has trained my husband to play fetch, by dropping a toy in his lap and looking expectant. Another cat has trained him to cover her up with a blanket. They’ve all trained me to give them the water that’s in canned tuna. I don’t dare buy the sort of tuna with no packing liquid, I’m sure that I’d have a clawed revolt on my hands.
Speaking of tuna, every cat I’ve ever had learned very quickly that if I open a can, it just might be tuna. And all of them show up at the sound of the (manual) can opener, and holler. Cats CAN learn from cause and effect, but it’s not always what the humans WANT them to learn. See AHunter3’s anecdote, above. The cat learned how to manipulate a human. And most cats are bright enough to manipulate humans…even the stupidest cats can learn some things. But mostly, cats are truly not interested in pleasing people. When they exhibit a behavior, it’s because they think they’re gonna get something they want from doing so. One of my cats makes a vocalization that sounds like “Mama”. She doesn’t mean “female parent”, she means “pet me and/or give me some food”. She learned this behavior after she was making random vocalizations (she’s Siamese) and when she happened to make that particular sound, I made a big fuss over her and petted her and told her how smart she was. She IS smart, scarily so (again, she’s Siamese), and she tried to repeat the behavior, which led to more petting and attention. So now she makes this vocalization when she wants attention.
The Siamese does this to my husband. Sometimes she jumps onto his shoulder in an effort to keep him inside the house. She lusts after his body. I told him that he should have been more careful when he made that wish as a teenager, because now he IS a pussy magnet.
Even my idiotic, literally brain-damaged younger cat will reliably do a few tricks (him being huge, his trademark is “Nicholas, toddler-hug!” which causes him to rear up on his hind legs and put his front arms around your knee). Sometimes you don’t even need to offer him a treat.
My older, smarter cat can play fetch, will “speak”, “sit”, and “stand up! (on hind legs)” on command, as well as occasionally “roll over”–provided there’s a treat in evidence.
In my experience, cats are much more about tangible rewards than dogs are. They don’t have the drive to please the alpha, but at the same time therefore, if they learn the ONLY treats they get are for doing tricks, they’ll pretty reliably do tricks.
My cat Livvy could sit up, fetch, shake hands, and hissed and ran out of the room at the mention of certain names (i.e. Newt Gingrich.)
Mainly it’s a matter of finding the right motivation. Most cats just don’t have anything in particular that they want badly enough to work for. Livvy loved these certain treats though, and woudl do anything she coudl to figure out how to get one.
It has nothing to do with “smart” or “stupid.” An old saying in show biz is if you need a dog that does five tricks, train a dog. If you need a cat that does five tricks, train five cats. Cats are, by their nature, solitary animals. Dogs are pack animals who want to please the leader of the pack (that would be you). But most any animal responds to rewards for desirable behavior.
In my experience (variable mileage, of course), cats will learn but won’t be involuntarily taught. If there is some kind of benefit available by learning to do something, they’ll do it. They won’t just learn a trick because you want them to.
Eg: my cat has learned to scratch at the door when she wants to sit in her favourite chair (MY chair). She knows I’ll get up and out of the chair to let her out of the room and she waits at the door until I am almost all the way there and then sprints back to my chair and curls up in it before I’ve figured out that I’ve just been duped by an evil little furball. She has plenty of other, similar, tricks she’s figured out to get her way. She will fetch a ball too, but only because the only way her favourite ball will ‘play’ properly is if she brings it back to me. If she doesn’t want to play right then, ‘fetch’ elicits no response.
She figures out my habits so quickly and manipulates them so effectively that I once thought I’d be able to train her to do simple things like ‘sit’ or ‘stay’. Nope. Not interested. Until I introduced shaved chicken as a reward. Now she will sit on command, as long as you keep giving her the reward. If you give the command just two or three times in a row with no reward, she stops obeying on the assumption that you’re all outta the good stuff.
The only other thing I’ve managed to teach her myself is that if I point at her and say NO in my biggest, boomingest voice, she is gonna get sprayed with a water pistol if she doesn’t STOP doing whatever naughty thing she’s doing. She understands that perfectly now and NO + pointing = obedient cat.
My cat has taught himself to go outside if he’s going to vomit. He’s got a delicate stomach and went through a stage while we were trying to find a cat food that agreed with him (after his previous fave was discontinued) where he’d just keep vomiting whatever he ate.
One day I got up and there was a trail of vomity bits going to the kitty door. ‘Huh’, I thought, ‘Has he finally worked out the relationship between gagging and Mum going ‘Out! Out! Out!’ and shunting him towards the door?’.
I thought maybe I was giving him too much credit, until a couple of nights later when he was lying on my lap and then suddenly sat up and bolted for the back door. He got almost all the way out before I heard ‘blurgh’.
Since then we’ve resolved the food issue and he’s fine but ever since, if he needs to vomit, he takes off for the back door to put himself outside. Such a smart kitty!
They’re not pack animals the way dogs are, but they’re not solitary, either. Even feral cats tend to form communities. In our house, our three cats are usually together most of the time. Usually in a pile.
I guess I missed it on the poll, the one where it says, They will learn tricks, but not the ones you’re trying to teach them.
One of my cats has learned a lot of tricks. He can open doors. He can turn on the computer. He can manipulate the dog next door into a frenzy any time he wants, for the lulz. He can make the toilet paper roll go from full to empty. He can teleport himself from any loud noise that could be related to catlike activity–he wasn’t in the room!
I see I’m not the first person to mention it.
Anyway, he’s far from stupid, but not very trainable.
The other cat is pretty dumb (but very pretty!). However, when we first got her she cleared out the mouse problem in about three hours and it never got out of hand again. We had worked on it for months, in concert with a professional pest control service. She was willing, even eager, to help with the squirrels in the attic thing, too, but we thought that probably wouldn’t be a good idea since she isn’t very big.
Actually, after first teaching my cats to beg by giving them tuna juice whenever I opened a can, I taught my dumb cat not to beg, and I did it by pouring green been juice into her bowl. Boy did she give me a dirty look–but I was then free to open any can I liked without interference from the furballs.