Yes, you can teach your cat to fetch
It's not just dogs who love the art of retrieval. Quite a few cat owners report that their feline friends love to fetch, too.
My own childhood cat, Salem, loved to fetch crumpled paper napkins. This surprised me, since I always considered fetch a classically canine pursuit. Turns out, though, it's not — you can absolutely teach your cat to fetch. If you do it right, they'll probably even enjoy it.
Dr. Andrea Tu, who is the medical director and a resident in animal behavior at NYC-based Behavior Vets, is a huge proponent of training cats. "It's a misperception that cats can't be trained," she said in an interview. "Cats can easily be trained. You just have to understand cats."
According to Dr. Tu — whose own cat, Kahlua, can high-five and jump through hoops on command — the key is remembering that the role of domestic cats in our lives has been different, historically, than that of dogs.
"[Dogs] have been living with humans for a very long time," she explained, which means they've become extremely adept at reading human body language. If we try to train a dog to sit, for example, but we're not very good at it, the dog will likely be able to figure out what we want it to do and learn to sit anyway.
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Cats, on the other hand, do not have such a storied trainer-trainee relationship with humans — they were domesticated thousands of years later than their canine counterparts. (According to Slate, dogs were first domesticated between 13,000 and 30,000 years ago, while domestic cats first popped up around 7000 B.C.) Their training attention span is much shorter.
"With cats, you're lucky if you get five minutes before their kitty minds go elsewhere," Dr. Tu said. She recommends limiting each session to exactly that (five minutes) and breaking up those sessions with playtime.
Aside from that, training a cat — like training a dog — is still all about reinforcing the behavior you want to see. Often, she said, she tells clients to use a clicker, which can help make up for cats' inability to read human body language by giving them a clear behavioral marker.
"Any time you make the clicker go off, you give your cat a piece of a treat," Dr. Tu said. "They'll learn that every time that thing goes off... treats fall from the sky."
For example, if you want your cat to fetch a certain ball, click the clicker each time the cat is near it and give them a treat. Over time, make the game harder — only click the clicker if the cat picks the ball up, for example — until the cat eventually associates retrieving the ball with getting a reward.
"You're gradually shaping that behavior to the point where the cat gets a treat when her head is near the ball. The cat gets a treat when her mouth is near the ball. The cat gets a treat when her mouth is on the ball. And then the cat gets a treat when she picks up the ball [and so on]," Dr. Tu said. Eventually, you can continue this progression all the way to a full fetch.
Think your cat would hate this? Understandable, given general cat lore. But she might enjoy it more than you expect.
"Biologically, cats are inclined to pick things up by their mouths and bring them to you," said Dr. Tu. You've seen evidence of this if your cat has ever left a partial dead mouse on your kitchen mat as a gift.
A game of fetch is probably a less gross outlet.
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