A Michael Broad Blog
The mantra for so many years has been that the only way to train your dog or cat is through positive reinforcement. This is reward-based. The concept of punishment to get a dog or cat to do what you want them to do has been quite rightly outlawed. It doesn’t work. It just makes …
We hear a lot about positive reinforcement in socialising feral and stray cats. Positive reinforcement is a way of training cats and it can be used to train a cat to trust a human and people in general at which point the cat is socialised and therefore domesticated. A cat called ‘Journey’ was a …
If you want to see a good example of reward based cat training (operant conditioning or instrumental learning), this cat video should satisfy you. The rewards is normally a piece of food and in this example the cats have been trained to tap on the bell to give the impression that they are calling …
Puss in Boots is a delightful fairy tale with a clever cat at its center. Here’s a deeper dive into the story and an answer to the question in the title. Disclosure: this entire article except for these few words at the beginning was written by Google Gemini an AI bot in response to …
The difference between punishing a cat and negative reinforcement, both of which should be avoided, is that the former requires the cat to be able to measure his/her behaviour against norms as decided by humans which is something that is beyond them while the later is simply associating a certain behaviour with something painful …
Disciplining your cat implies punishing your cat. We should never punish our cat. Therefore I prefer training. Training should mean positive reinforcement to encourage your cat to do the things that you want. I don’t believe in bad cat behavior. To a cat there is no such thing.
When Oliver Widger quit his job, he wasn’t chasing a bigger paycheck or climbing a corporate ladder — he was following the call of the ocean. But he didn’t set sail alone. His first mate? A whiskered, four-pawed feline named Clarence. The Oregon-based adventurer recently went viral after documenting his unusual voyage: a solo …
The Times of Saturday, January 29, 2025 has a nice article about the FluentPet HexTile System. I decided to investigate it and create an infographic which explains it. I’m told that thousands of animals from 45 countries including cats, rabbits and goats are participating in the world’s largest study of “button pressing pets”. This …
