If you want your cat do sit, stay, heel - get a dog! If you’re like me, you admire your cat for being a cat and you want him to behave as nothing other than a cat, but a well-behaved one.

We need to understand how cats learn to be able to train them. They don’t read, they don’t attend school, they rely on their instincts and learn by experience. If you make their experience a good one, they will repeat it. If the experience is bad, unpleasant, hurtful, they will avoid it. It’s a joy for them to scratch your carpet, your curtains, your furniture, they will do it again. Is no fun to walk on the surface of a hot stove, that they will avoid in future.

Whatever you want your cat to do should be hihgly rewarding and satisfying. If you want your cat to stay away from things, make their experience an unpleasant one.

Sometimes a cat gets rewarded unintentionally for bad behavior. A cat comes pouncing on the owner early in the morning, meowing like crazy, being a pest. They owners get up and feed the cat, play with him or let him outside. Now your have accidentally rewarded you pet for bad behavior.

Cats can hardly be caught in the act when shredding paper, scratching furniture, etc. to discipline the cat at that time. It’s a big mistake to grab the cat, pointing out a possible wet spot, and then dragging him to the litter box. The cat learns now that the litter box is a torture place, and being grabed by the owner is not pleasurable either.

Try the following for better results:

1.) Don’t punish your cat.
2.) Enable your cat to perform behaviors you want her to learn and reward her for a job well done.
3.) Don’t make it easy on the cat to misbehave and get her reward for it.

Make your relationship with your cats fun, play with it and pay attention to it’s need. Bored cats can be very inventive in doing things you don’t want them to do. Cats that are neglected or upset will not only become overly active and/or destructive, they might even refuse to use the litterbox.

Reward your cat for a job well done, for good behavior. That does not mean you need to feed them treats every time they used the litterbox or did not destroy your furniture, just talk with them, pet them, and let them know how you appreciate their company.

Litter box training is normally not a big deal, cats are in general very clean animals. With all the cats I had I used one simple method. As soon as the cat entered the household, I set up a litter box (preferably in a bathroom with tile floor) and showed it to the animal. (Make certain that the door to this room is always open, the box always accessible for the animal). So far I have never had a litter box problem with any of my numerous cats - from 7 weeks, that was the youngest, to 2 year old ones, that was the oldest I adopted. Make sure the litter box is always clean, clean in the eyes of your cat. Some are very picky! In case you have such a picky cat, get a second box. Don’t yell at it if it is that thorough to cover his “poop” and the sand will fly all over the place. Your cat tries to do a good job. I have made the experience that not so fine sand is less likely to be spread all over the place, but that is up to you to decide which kind you’d like to use. You might want to try one of these self-cleaning or even automatically cleaning litterboxes. We recently reviewed 3 of them. See results in >> Category Reviews - Litterboxes