ArcaMax

Q: We have a 5-year-old red and white neutered male indoor cat named Charlie. He is very vocal and cries for something to eat whenever we are in the kitchen. He does not stop until we give him something. This has become very annoying and we have tried to teach him not to do this by squirting him with water from a water pistol when we are in the kitchen. He does run away as soon as we show him the water pistol -- we do not have to squirt him anymore, but a minute later he comes right back again. Is there any other way that we can deter him from doing this? -- Jane Garcia, Las Vega, NV

A: The problem is you are using punishment to stop the behavior of an animal and punishment works best in humans. In animals, punishment causes fear, stress or sometimes even aggression. It is hard for the animal to understand what the punishment is for. Your cat has no idea why you are spraying it with water. It only has learned to fear the water pistol and has attributed it to just another inexplicable thing that the humans do.

The best way to modify such behaviors in animals is with extinction and that is done by showing the cat the conditioned stimulus -- being in the kitchen -- without the reward -- being fed.

You just have to withdraw all interactions with the cat whenever he yowls for food when you are in the kitchen as this will eventually lead to extinction of the behavior. The reason it works is because the cat decided for itself that there is no point in wasting his time by yowling for food when it does not get him what he wants.

I would even advise you to feed the cat in a different room of the house so there is no confusion. Of course, this all sounds fine in print but it is very hard to do in real life. The whole family has to join together to ignore the cat when he yowls and it takes many weeks to accomplish this.

If you ignore the cat for 10 days and on the 11th give in then you are back to square one as the cat has learned that if he continues to pester you, he will eventually be rewarded.

Your cat is only 5 years old, and house cats live a long time. So you must apply yourself to working hard and make the investment in time and patience to make the behavior become extinct. If you don't, then what you are doing presently will be that way for the rest of the cat's life.

Q: We have three cats that are always indoors. They all get along well -- one is 5 years old and we got two kittens over the summer. The cat we got first seems to be teaching the other two kittens to open the drawers in our bedroom dresser. He always did this and we thought it was cute, but now we see the younger cats opening the drawers themselves and they pull out all the clothes and scatter them across the floor. The drawers do not slide very well and we cannot imagine that they learned this through trial and error. We have had cats for the last 50 years and never saw a cat do this before and it seems odd that we now have three. Could the older cat have shown the kittens how to do this and is there anything we can do to stop this? -- Roberta McDonald, Chicago, IL

A: I doubt that the older cat actually consciously taught the younger ones to open the drawers but the kittens did learn for themselves through what I call observational learning and what a scientist would call social learning.

This always fascinates me as it is not a behavior that is taught or learned through trial and error. The behavior is performed spontaneously in it complete or near complete form after the animal has observed it being performed by another member of its social group. The original cat learned it by watching you and the kittens learned by watching the older cat.

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