What gives people feelings of power:
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but you can just train the cat when they are young smh
Yeah just buy a clicker and find out what kind of treats they like and give them a click and a treat at the same time. Then you can just replace the clicker with clicking your tongue or something. Granted, you have to live with the knowledge that you are tricking them every time you dont have a treat, lol
I heard the advice that you shouldn’t click if you don’t follow up with a treat - at least if you want the click to remain effective reinforcement. As I understand it, the point of clicking is that it acts as a virtual and instant treat that can be given at the exact instant the desirable behavior is done, while giving a physical treat takes a moment to do making it harder for the cat to understand what behavior they did that caused it - kind of like time shifting the dopamine hit of receiving a treat backwards in time to more tightly couple it with the desirable behavior. So my strategy is to only click if I have treats on hand, but then I use that to train commands that don’t always result in a treat or only result in praise. That way the click->treat association remains strong and useful for training new behavior but I end up with commands I can use without treats or weakening the usefulness of the clicker.
That said if it works for you then it works! I just read a lot of content about animal training so I nerd out a bit.
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Do NOT clicker train your catboy without giving them a treat every time.
why clicker, you just wave the treat in their eyesight and say their name until they come to you, and then move further and further away (in another room), then stop giving a treat and start/slternate giving pets or play when they come (mainly to stop future disappointments for kitty). depending on kitty, in same room they later will just lift their head to check what are you on about, but they do come from another room still, years later
Clicker is just very loud/obvious and speeds up the initial training, but no you don’t have to use it. I enjoyed seeing my cat would come zooming from the complete opposite end of my house though, lol
As I understand it, the main benefit of using a clicker before giving a treat is that it makes it easier to train behaviors especially when you can’t present a treat at the exact moment the desired behavior is performed. With a clicker, you can click the instant they do the right thing and it will give them a dopamine hit as if they received a treat which you then give. That makes it much easier to associate the reward with the behavior because the click anchors the reward with the precise moment/action performed, whereas giving a treat afterwards can take some time for them to figure out which action performed led to the treat.
Once they learn the behavior though the clicker isn’t really needed. For example I would prompt my cat to scratch her post, then click the instant she put her paws on the post and then give a treat. That helped to speed up the realization that it was putting her paws on the post that led to the treat, whereas if you just give a treat afterwards, the dopamine hit doesn’t happen until they get to the treat. Basically just time shifts the dopamine hit back in time to build the association faster. Nowadays she knows the phrase scratch your post and what to do, so I don’t use the clicker anymore - it’s more for training new tricks or getting training more established.
you dont even need the treats or the clicker, at least not for teaching a cat to come when called. i’m teaching this to my second cat now and he’s got the idea now. i make the noise and he comes for the pets.