If you found this site via one of my Facebook ads, you may be wondering about my cat, Frenchie (aka Chi Chi). My wife and I adopted her in January 2021 from Greene Street Rescue in Philadelphia. At the time she was sick and underweight, but once she was feeling better she showed her playful, mischievous side, as well as her love for any and all foods. After reading The Trainable Cat, we started training her so that things like getting in her carrier and getting her flea medicine would be easier and less stressful. Since she’s so food-motivated, 10 minutes a day of clicker training has worked well.
In owning a cat we’ve learned that cats like routine. After we got our initial goals down, she still wanted to do training (or at least, get the food she gets when we train), and the interaction seems good. So we started looking for other things to work on, and one idea was to mix in some exercise, leading to the hoop jump. She actually mastered it fairly quickly — it took maybe a week or two, but that was with <10 minutes a day of training on that. We now combine that with other “agility course” elements, like going through a cat tunnel and jumping over other items.
The majority of our training time is still spent on exercise, getting in her carrier, and being comfortable getting brushed or getting flea medicine. When we’re bored we will sometimes work on other tricks, like playing the piano and giving high-fives. She seems to like the piano as she’s taken to walking over there when we do training, e.g. please let’s do this instead of get in the carrier.
If you want video updates when she learns something new, you can sign-up below. As a bonus, when you sign up I’ll send videos of her high-five and piano-playing.
