As someone who has helped train a cat to come when someone whistles, it's not news to me that you can train a housecat to do certain things. However, a cat truly is a different beast than a dog:
“Dogs will work for free. They’re happy to please you,” [Steve] Dale says. “Cats aren’t going to volunteer their time forever for nothing. They want to be paid, and they’re a bit less forgiving ... It has to be training where you’re being upbeat and the cat’s having a good time and being paid for it in the form of bite-size treats that are easy to swallow.”
Keep kitty training sessions short and sweet. Your cat’s attention span probably has a range of two to 10 minutes. Always end training when the cat has done something right.
In our case, my brother and I trained our old housecat, Little Morris, to respond to the whistle when she was still a kitten. We associated our whistling with her purring and milk-feeding behavior. Kittens will purr and knead the mother's teats so that the milk flows easier. Until the day she died, she would still jump in our laps when we whistled, rubbing her paws on our chests as she purred. Oh, and what's the story behind the name? She looked like Morris the Cat, our last name was Morris, and she was indeed the smallest family member. Hence, Little Morris.
Our kitten taught us how to play fetch with him. Now he insistently clocks my husband in the head with a toy mouse every morning at 6:00. Like clockwork.
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