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takes too long to get from the end of a trick to the point where the trainer can reward him. The time you have between the behavior you want and the time you reward is five seconds. That's true for cats, dogs, horses, pigs, dolphins, fish, cockroaches, and even humans. Five seconds. It may seem surprising at first, but if you think about your annual review at work, it's not very motivating, even if you get high marks. However, when your boss is standing in your cubicle and you do something to help him and he says, right there and then "Good job! Thanks for doing that!" you instantly feel good and want to do it again. Five seconds.

The other training technique I mentioned in this article is hand signals. That's particular to cats. Dogs have been shown to develop large vocabularies of human words, but the human voice seems to be pitched such that cats simply don't distinguish most of our words. A hand signal is essential in cat training to teaching them what to do.

With basic clicker training, I taught my boisterous and difficult cat Alladin to sit on command within ten minutes of our first training session. After three months, he now stands on hind legs, gives kisses, lies down, comes when called, jumps down from the table, and walks on leash. Now, he's a smart cat, to be sure, but I had a dumb-as-rocks kitty who learned to jump onto a seat to take his pill before dinner, without even trying. It doesn't take very long for a motivated cat to learn how to do something!

Resources:
* Cat Training in Ten Minutes by Miriam Fields-Babineau:
http://www.lib rarything.com/work/1569047&boo k=6574742
* Getting Started: Clicker Training for Cats by Karen Pryor: http://www.librarything.com/wo rk/719626&book=6575355
* How to Get Your Cat to Do What You Want by Warren Eckstein: http://www.librarything.com/wo rk/5805&book=9061887

Learn more about this author, Stephanie Bryant.
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