Typical internet cats. Videos, pics, memes, and discussion welcome!
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Cats are much more intelligent than people give them criteria for, but the things my cats are smart about are so unpredictable.
Like, ours will get lost in our own house sometimes, but he understands how the doorknob works. He can’t use the doorknob, but he tries. He’s also very trainable, as long as it’s to do sobering and not to not do something.
He’s kind of an idiot, but the things he’s clever at are genuinely clever (they mostly revolve around being an asshole to the other cat)
My childhood cat figured out very quickly how to use the toilet, and would only do her business there. She was a smart kitty.
Edit: more context - this was in Russia in the 90s, and kitty litter was not a thing. We had to use shredded newspaper for her litter box, and she clearly hated going in it. So she watched us using the toilet, then we put some newspaper shreds into the toilet (one of those European toilets with a “shelf”), and she just went. She seemed much happier with this arrangement.
I had a cat who would do this when I was a kid!
Well now it's just a dominance thing. They CAN use the toilet. They just prefer watching us clean their poop for a half hour, and then IMMEDIATELY poop again to ruin all the work we just did.
Dogs domesticated themselves. Cats domesticated us.
Learned a thing or two from Charles Mingus?
Positive reinforcement works always better than negative reinforcement, also with humans :)
Instead of teaching don't do this, reframe with "let's do another more exciting thing instead".
It's way more tiring, but it works!
My wife decided that we should try positive reinforcement to get our cat to stop destroying things. Every time he started to wreck something, we were supposed to play with him.
All that did is teach him that he should attack something if he wants to play.
So now, I'm tired and more things get damaged. Yay, cat ownership!
That’s…not how positive reinforcement works lol.
Positive reinforcement would be providing scratching and chewing opportunities that you are ok with, and providing rewards when the cat chooses to use the designated equipment.
Yeah replacement behaviours are an excellent way to teach "not that" without aversives.
What playing with a cat when it does any behaviour does is train it to do that behaviour.
(provided the cat enjoys the attention)
I know many cats who can actually use doorknobs. It can be annoying but they're also pretty smart so they don't do too much stupid with it
My childhood cat Zeke could use doorknobs but only used it to go into my parents room and poop.
When that happened, they'd rub its nose in it, smacking its ass with a wooden spoon.
When they did that, it'd poop somewhere in angry retaliation.
These were the geniuses who brought me to adulthood, which explains a lot, unfortunately.
Cats are smart, they're just independent enough that it makes them useless for most jobs. Cats have more sensitive noses than bloodhounds, but you'll hold up the escaped prisoner's shirt and say "sniff! Sniff! Now go get him!" and the cat will say "Pssh, you want him, you go get him." and lay down and start licking a paw.
Or the cat caused the fire just so he could be a hero.
The cat caused the fire because he wasn't given a 5th meal that day
Yes, they can be really catty about that.
What's so heroic about getting a human to save your house?
ikr headline should be: "Cat forced to wake up human in the middle of the night to do it's freakin job" / "Little was expected from dog, who performed accordingly."
"Unfortunately the dog did not escape during the excitement, which is why the cat was slow cooking the matches in the first place. It does not seemed deterred by this failure."