John Bradshaw is a biologist who founded and directs the world-renowned Anthrozoology Institute, based at the University of Bristol. He has been studying the behaviour of domestic cats and their owners for over twenty-five years, and is the author of, among others, the Sunday Times bestsellers In Defence of Dogs and Cat Sense.
As Feline Behaviour Specialist at charity International Cat Care and Visiting Fellow in the School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, Sarah Ellis specializes in the science and psychology of companion animals. John and Sarah are on-screen experts for, among others, BBC2’s Cat Watch.
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First published in the United States of America by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 2016
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2016
Copyright © John Bradshaw and Dr Sarah Ellis Consultancy Ltd, 2016
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Cover illustration by Jeanne Lemerle (photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay)/Stéphane Maréchalle)
ISBN: 978-0-141-97933-5
Sarah’s Preface
John’s Preface
Conventions used in this book
Introduction: Why Train a Cat?
CHAPTER 1 How Cats Learn: And what you can do to make it easy for them
CHAPTER 2 Understanding Your Cat’s Training Requirements
CHAPTER 3 Our Training Philosophy: Mastering the key skills
CHAPTER 4 How Cats Adapt to Living with an Alien Species (Us!)
CHAPTER 5 Cats and Other Cats
CHAPTER 6 Cats and Other Pets
CHAPTER 7 Cooped-up Cats
CHAPTER 8 Touch: Insult or indulgence?
CHAPTER 9 Flight, Fight or Freeze? Cats don’t take kindly to stress (especially visits to the vet’s)
CHAPTER 10 Cats at Large: The big outdoors
CHAPTER 11 Shredded Curtains and Bloody Corpses: The less appealing sides of cat behaviour
Conclusion
Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
Dedication: to Sarah’s beloved cat Herbie
During the final weeks of writing this book, my beloved Herbie unexpectedly died. I would like to dedicate this book to him, without whose inspiration I would not have had the knowledge, skill or power to complete this book. My wish is he leaves a legacy behind—helping to teach many more owners how they can help their cats cope with, and even enjoy, the trials and tribulations that living alongside us brings.
Herbie … your paw prints forever walk my heart.
Training cats is something that I stumbled upon. Now, when I think back to when it first started, I realize I was actually about seven years old—although obviously I did not know at that time what impact this would have on my later life, or that of the cats I would own. My mother bought our family a Burmese kitten. This kitten became the subject of all my affections—forming the focus of elaborate projects for Brownie animal lovers’ badges, paintings and illustrations for art competitions and much talked about at school to friends, to name just a few. Claude, as he was known, was very affectionate, food motivated and active—the perfect combination of traits for training. Before long, Claude was being lured over elaborate furniture obstacles with tasty morsels sneaked from the fridge and excitedly chasing a wand toy that I dragged at high speed over garden jumps made from my mother’s clothesline poles. I think my proudest party trick was to double tap my shoulder, whereupon Claude would jump from the back of the sofa up onto my shoulder and balance there as I moved carefully around the living room to the windowsill. With a double tap on it, he would leap down and rub his face against mine. There is no doubt that the love I felt for Claude was reciprocated—he slept in my bed and in my doll’s cots and often accompanied me on dog walks. I lost Claude on my twenty-sixth birthday at the grand age of nineteen—what an imprint he had made on me, as by this time I was already halfway through studying for a PhD in feline behaviour.
My research, alongside my professional work with feline problem behaviours, gave me great insight into current welfare concerns associated with modern cat ownership—I discovered just how few cats enjoy going to the vet, lie back and relax while travelling in the car, enthusiastically open their mouths and swallow their worming pill, or embrace the new addition to the family, whether feline, human or canine. As a dedicated cat owner, I felt it only right to try to ensure that my cats, from an early age, had the life skills to be unfazed by such events. I am not a professional animal trainer, but I have been very fortunate to have worked alongside some wonderful trainers who have shared their knowledge and practical skills with me and on occasion, let me assist with training (puppies).
Combining this with my knowledge of cats and learning theory, I began incorporating training into the daily lives of all my cats. Training has helped my cats cope well with the many challenges life has thrown at them. Positive feedback came early on: owners sitting next to me in the vet’s waiting room would remark with surprise at how calm and relaxed my cats were in their carriers, and the vet would comment, “I wish all cats were as good as yours.” From that moment on, I decided that I would train every cat I owned as a matter of course.
Woody, the first cat I owned in my adult life, moved house with me many times, even crossing the Irish Sea without batting an eyelid, thanks to the preparatory training I had carried out. Later, Cosmos, another of my cats and one who appears throughout this book, warmly shared his home with several foster cats and subsequently accepted Herbie, who arrived as a permanent resident as a mischievous and playful kitten. A few years later, Herbie and Cosmos were taught to share their home with a canine addition—Squidge the Jack Russell. Knowing I might get a dog at some point in their lifetimes, I had begun training them to accept visiting dogs from an early age, well before we brought home Squidge.
The most recent addition has been baby Reuben, perhaps the addition I was most apprehensive about—after all, there was no way he could be rehomed if it didn’t work out! However, I am delighted that Reuben, now a toddler, is showing promise as the next-generation cat lover in our family and that all the preparatory and ongoing training with the cats has led them to relish his presence; Cosmos will often chirrup at Reuben when he comes in from outdoors and greets him with a rub of his face.
Because training had produced such happy consequences for my own cats, I felt compelled to spread the word—part of this was a year-long series of how-to training articles for a UK national cat magazine. The articles were warmly received and I realized that they had really touched only the tip of the iceberg. I was very keen to do more, mulling the idea of a book on the topic over in my head. It was at this time that I began working with the BBC on their Horizon TV programme The Secret Life of the Cat, where one of my first roles was to teach owners how to train their cats to wear GPS tracking devices. John, who worked alongside me on the programme, witnessed this and as we began to talk about training cats and to share ideas, the concept for a jointly written book was born. While training cats may have all begun unintentionally for me, I’ve seen such positive impact on cat welfare that I’m inspired to spread this how-to training across the globe.
As Sarah says, the concept for this book came together in 2013, when we met up at “Cat HQ” in the picturesque village of Shamley Green, the location for the BBC’s Horizon TV documentaries about cats. I have to confess that until Sarah suggested the idea to me, I had never thought much about training cats. I knew a few people who had trained their cats to do tricks, including one who delighted in his cat’s ability to hop up onto the seat of a conventional toilet and use it in place of a litter tray (no, we will not be describing how this might be done in this book!). I’d come across “performing cats” in TV studios, where none seemed especially comfortable, presumably because they were unavoidably well outside their usual familiar territories. I did know that cats were fantastic learners, despite their reputation for self-reliance and independence. The research showing how each and every cat learns how to use its meow (Chapter 4) had brought home to me, as much as anything could, how cats adapt their behaviour to get by in the world that we expect them to live in. But unlike Sarah I had never put two and two together, that pet cats could—indeed should—be taught how to lead happier lives.
Everyone knows that an untrained dog is both a liability for its owner and a danger to itself (though there are several conflicting schools of thought as to how best to train a dog). I’ve never heard anyone complain about a cat being “untrained”—luckily for them, cats are far less of a social liability than dogs are. However, in some parts of the world, most notably in Australia and New Zealand, “dangerous cats” legislation is beginning to appear. Not of course for the same reasons behind “dangerous dog” laws—the danger is perceived as being toward wildlife rather than toward people. The science to support such legislation is somewhat lacking—for example, “cat curfews” have failed to halt the decline in some Australian marsupials—but its very existence demonstrates that for some people, cats are unwelcome additions to the local fauna, even though in many places they have been part of the landscape for hundreds, even thousands, of years, and the local wildlife seems to have adapted somewhat to their presence.
In many places (not just Australasia) the pressure is on to keep cats indoors 24/7. Some advocate this as a way of preventing them from hunting; others—including some rehoming charities—as a way of keeping cats away from motor vehicles, predators (for example, coyotes in North America) and aggressive neighbourhood cats who wish to dispute your cat’s right to roam anywhere, even out through his own cat flap. Despite these pressures, we’re not in favour of turning cats into exclusively indoor pets. However, we acknowledge that some cats and other owners’ situations do favour an indoor-only lifestyle, or at least require that serious consideration be given to the trade-offs between the negatives of outdoor access and those of lifelong confinement. Therefore, in this book we suggest a number of ways that training can provide possible solutions to these dilemmas—a cat can be called back just like a well-behaved dog when the owner senses danger that the cat cannot; diversity can be added to the indoor environment to satisfy the cat’s need to explore and investigate; indoor (or indeed indoor/outdoor) cats can play games with their owners that mimic hunting and hence (hopefully) reduce the cat’s instinctive desire to hunt; cats can be taught to play games with their owners that have little directly to do with hunting but simply enhance their relationship as well as providing both with amusement.
Ultimately, our ambition is to break down not just one but two preconceptions: first, that cats can’t be trained; second, that cats can’t benefit from being trained. We’ve always known that the first is demonstrably false. So far as the second is concerned, we believe that the well-being of the cats of the future depends upon a fundamental change in attitudes, a change that reflects current demands that all domestic animals should be “model citizens.” The days when dogs were allowed to roam wherever they wished are long gone, at least in the West: for cats, a similar situation seems to be fast approaching. Not that we are advocating that cats should become just like dogs—the two animals are as unalike as chalk and cheese in terms of their basic natures and their fundamental requirements for a happy life, which can be (perhaps over-) simplified as “dogs need their people, cats need their space.” The kind of training that we are advocating for cats is nothing like the “obedience” training that you’ll find described in most dog-training books. It’s much more about helping cats to adapt to the demands we increasingly place on them, demands that cats used to be expected to sort out for themselves.
Our hope is that if only cats could read, they would reward our efforts with whatever the feline equivalent of gratitude may be.
If this were a science book, we’d be referring to the humans as “he” and “she,” and the animals as “it.” However, we quickly came to the conclusion that this convention was totally inappropriate for a book that aims to enhance the relationship between individual owners and their unique, individual cats: in particular, it felt completely wrong not to use the more personal “he” or “she” for the cats as well as the humans (and at least in the United States there are moves to adopt this new and more personal approach in scientific writing). However, we have no way of telling whether you, the reader, are trying to train a male cat or a female cat. So, to avoid clumsiness, throughout this book we will be referring to the cat as “he” (please don’t be offended, lady cats, there is logic behind this, as you’ll see). However, where we are referring to the cat as a species and not as an individual, we will refer to the cat as “it.”
The eleven numbered chapters all follow the same format. Each begins with a general introduction to the way that cats perceive the world, relevant to the topic of that chapter, mainly written by John. Then follows the main body of the chapter, which describes how training can be used to address that topic and are written from Sarah’s perspective (because she’s the one with training experience). So wherever you read “I” or “me” or “my,” that is Sarah. Owners are referred to throughout as female—sorry, that could be seen as a terrible cliché, but we’re not trying to be sexist: rather, it keeps things simple and avoids references to cats and to owners getting muddled up. To male owners of female cats, especially, we offer our sincere apologies, and ask you to (hypothetically) switch genders while you read this book.
For some readers, the extent to which we personify cats in this book may not go far enough. However, we see no compelling reason to abandon the tradition of referring to cats as “pets” and their associated humans as their “owners.” For us, “ownership” of a cat implies responsibility and certainly does not imply the right to treat a cat as if it were the inanimate possession. We worry that the alternative term “guardian” implies a legal status that arises from some mental deficiency in the animal—hardly an appropriate way to characterize the relationship between a cat and his significant person.1 “Pet parent” is simply too anthropomorphic for us to stomach. We can confidently say that we own our cats, because privately we can admit that, albeit in a slightly different sense, they own us!