After training my cat Ninja to do some very basic behaviors like come, sit, stay and target I decided to move onto jumping behaviors. I thought she would have fun with them and I knew I would.
The next tricks I taught her were:
- Jump up (onto objects I point to)
- Jump from point A to point B
- Jump through a hoop
- Spin on command
- Jump into my lap on command
Making it a total of 11 tricks she has learned in 1.5 months. I gave her an entire month off training because I was traveling with her so it has been over a span of 2.5 months if you get real specific.
Teaching any jumping behaviors came very quickly to her. Once she learned the “jump”, the other jumping behaviors were a piece of cake for her to master.
The toughest one which I assumed would be the easiest was the “spin” which I think was so basic it bored her. So I had to make sure to mix up her training sessions a lot and make things more random for her in an effort to make the training more fun and less predictable on her end.
I actually had the best time teaching her to jump into my lap on command. It happened in just two days and it was a lot of fun. I hadn’t done any training where she had to do something on me so that changed it up a lot for her and took her a little bit to figure out that I was actually part of the behavior. Once she figured that out, it went super fast!
The other day I was able to really test out some of her training. I had a friend over and she performed every trick she knew in front of my friend which I was very impressed about. She hasn’t had to perform in front of anyone yet and she acted like nothing was different.
I was also outside earlier the next day and I heard a cat fight behind my fence. I kept climbing it and looking over, expecting to see Ninja and some other cat but hoping it wasn’t her. Finally, I called her and she came running and jumped over the fence into the yard… untouched. She looked like she had either done the butt-kicking or was watching it all happen… or clueless, who knows! But I was very happy she came on command from outdoors and out of sight.
Her training has really been useful for every day life with her. I recommend everyone train their cat, it makes a world of difference and really just makes your life easier, too.