Being around lots of animal trainers all the time, we ended up actually getting Ninja from a tiger handler. In almost all cat-related shows with big cats, they train the tigers or lions what is referred to as “The Rise” which is when the cat gets up on its hind legs and usually eats a piece of meat from the trainer’s hands at the top, wrapping both paws around the trainer’s arm to get to full height. It looks exactly like this.

Dave thought it would be funny and cute to teach this behavior to our cat, Ninja. Of course, we would bend down to her height, but she could still reach up.

In the video above you will see her do the behavior, pretty cool, huh?

Aside from potty training, it was the first thing we taught her using clicker training. We used some generic treats (tuna flavor) from the petstore as her reward for doing the rise, and we began teaching it to her by having her first smell the food and jump for it, then eventually phased out the food and turned it into just the behavior for the food.