Verushka70

#they made me laugh my ass off rn

#but look - them 'not helping'

#is not the point

#the point is THEY JOINED IN

#no one held a gun

#to these cats and MADE THEM do this

#this is clearly them doing it

#FOR THE FUN OF IT!

#for A PIECE OF THE ACTION!

#which is really very very cat of them

#if you think about it & know cats

#i mean why do they insist

#on getting between you

#and your book

#or your phone

#or your laptop or tablet

#THEY WANT IN ON IT

#also what's your problem

#you should be paying attention

I have trained cats. They're not dumb. Not all of my cats, not even most of them; I've had a cat or multiple cats continuously since 1993, but only trained two - one much more successfully than the other. But then most of the time, with most of the cats, I wasn't trying to train any of them.

TL;DR: the massive differences in cat and dog evolution and domestication = totally different motivations for behavior with humans and other pets; alleged untrainability of cats refuted/defended, easy trainability of dogs explained.

Trainability comes down to motivation. Cats' and dogs' motivation for doing what you want them to do depends on a number of factors, including imo their original domestication.

Dogs were domesticated as far as we know from wolves hanging around hunter gatherer humans who they could smell had food when they did not, and were hungry. These wolves were motivated to make humans 1) not want to kill them, 2) actually want them around, so they could 3) have some of our food.

The wolves' original motivation was "they have food, we are hungry, how do we get it? how should we behave/what should we do to get them to give us their food or the carcass or scraps to us?"

Humans were clearly able to observe wolves hunt in groups and bring down prey, and probably thought "well they could rip us to shreds, but they're hanging around for our leftovers, they're great hunters, and they're great early warning systems about the presence of worse predators and also prey animals; maybe we could hunt together and get more food." Because starvation was always a very real possibility. For everybody.

(Also this did not happen in isolation; any dead animal, regardless of which animal killed it, attracts multiple species to it - from the animal(s) that killed it and maybe cached it, to all the scavengers that benefit from it; and these species wait their turn and aren't typically killed by the hunter that originally killed the carcass. Humans and wolves would've been very familiar with that type of coexistence.)

Humans had something wolves wanted; wolves did something well that humans wanted to do better. Convergent interests and mutual benefit over thousands of years and voilà: domestic dogs. Hunting dogs, initially.

Cats became domesticated once humans began farming. The stored harvested grain attracted mice/rodents. The concentration of mice attracted their natural predators, cats, who started killing them. Humans decided cats were awesome because the more rodents cats killed, the more food humans had.

This is key: The cats didn't come for the humans' food. Cats came because their food was hanging around our food. Cats had zero motivation for pleasing us humans or getting us to like them/give them food - not like wolves did. We weren't eating mice and then sharing them with cats. The mice were freely available.

Cats tolerated us to get to their food. Humans liked having cats around because it helped limit food loss, so humans started trying to attract cats. Cats' needs did not converge with human needs like wolves' did. They ran parallel to humans' needs.

Over thousands of years cats and dogs became domesticated completely differently because of those initial major differences in why each species was attracted to living near, then with, humans in the first place.

This resulted, by a thousand or so years ago, in lots of different breeds of dogs that were selectively bred to perform very specific functions for humans.

And lots of different breeds of cats that... don't.

Dogs were so specifically trainable because in the course of their co-evolution/domestication, they wanted to please humans. This is a very strong drive in many if not most or all dogs.* It was a beneficial survival strategy. Those dogs that pleased their humans lived to pass those genes into the next generations of dogs.

But cats still do the same exact thing that they did when they originally began tolerating and living with humans: they kill small prey. They might be on a ship doing it, or in an inner city, roaming a farm or a suburban backyard... but they're still killing mice (and sometimes birds, fish, bugs, butterflies, anything they can catch).

(Or, if they're exclusively indoor cats, they sit at the window and they look out at those and they want to stalk and kill them. This is why indoor-only cats need LOTS of play and stimulation. Their inborn, normal evolutionary behaviors and traits get almost zero outlet as indoor cats, and it literally makes them crazy. Please listen to Jackson Galaxy.)

Everyone who tries to train cats, tries to train them the way you train dogs. (Including me. Duh. Sigh.) Because that's all we know. And it is so easy to train dogs because they have that inherent need to please humans, and they've been bred over hundreds (thousands) of years to hunt (without killing), stalk (point to the prey), run (run prey to exhaustion), retrieve (without eating what they retrieve) - as well as rescue, assist the disabled, find dead human bodies/remains, search for drugs, sniff out cancer, etc etc.

No one ever invested time in learning what motivates cats to learn/be trained, because cats have always done on their own what we wanted them to do - kill mice stealing farmers' grain - without us having trained them... Because really the cats were doing what they wanted. It just happened to also be what we wanted.

When I trained my cat (RIP Rex, 2023) to sit and to give me his paw, I trained him the way I trained my dogs (which I've also had more or less continuously since the late 80s). And it was really, really interesting watching my cat thinking during training.

Yes, he wanted the treats I offered. But it was clear he didn't understand why he was expected to do anything for them.

That reflexive "what should I do? what do you want??" eagerness of dogs is not there at all in cats - a completely understandable state of affairs when you consider cats' domestication: they never needed to please us to get what they wanted from us for the last several thousand years.

Like, I would watch my cat seriously think through what I was asking him to do every time I trained him and practiced with him. He had to think it through. He had no frame of reference. Doing what a human wanted, to get something he wanted from the human, did not come naturally to him, or to any of his millions of cat ancestors before him. He did not have thousands of years of conditioning and selective breeding making his brain even remotely receptive to this concept.

The struggle was real. And it took anywhere from fifteen-twenty minutes (in the beginning) to 10-12 seconds (when we got good at it together).

Whereas dogs will sit in milliseconds - before you even finish speaking the command! Dogs have been genetically primed to please us for tens of thousands of years! Cats have not. Not ever.

My cat: "Ohhhhhh, yay, treats! Wait, what? I can't have treats? Oh I can, but - wait, what? Only under this very weird special condition that I sit down instead of standing on my four feet? why? why are there conditions on treats now, when there weren't before? why would I even do that? I don't feel like doing that right now. I don't feel like doing that most of the time, except when I suddenly do. Just give me the treats, come on.

No? I can't have 'em until and unless I do the sitting thing? Do I even want to sit down? I'm not sure that I do. They're yummy treats, but are they that yummy? I don't know. Maybe. Sit right now, though? Really? Well, I do like those treats. I mean, I always want them, when I can get them. They are tasty. I guess I can do this weird thing you're asking, if I get treats for doing it. What a strange state of affairs this is. God, you humans are so weird; I do not get you.

Fine. Okay. I'll sit. Slowly, because I'm not entirely sure this is what you want - and it definitely isn't what I want, at the moment, though I'm also not completely opposed to it - but it seems that you really want this before I get treats. Okay, I'm sitting. Okay, I sat. Oh, finally! TREATS! Wait, just one? WHATEVER. [stands on four feet to eat] nom nom nom.

Oh, that was delicious. I want more, please. I'll wait. Huh? wait, what? I have to do what I literally just did to get more treats? What is going on here?? I already did it! Wasn't that enough?

Are you serious? My concession to your bizarro whim does not beget multiple treats? Why?? You are a fiend of unimaginable proportions in ways I never before suspected, human. Bravo at your stealth obstreperousness that is mildly pissing me off rn because this is simply preposterous.

No, I'm not going to sit again! I did what you asked, treats were proffered - note the plural! - and you changed the terms of the deal after the fact. Oh for fucks sake. You're insisting on this, are you? Goddamn those treats and my weakness for them. All right, all right. I really don't want to, but I will.

Fine. I'm sitting. This is kind of an outrage. But okay. I sat. YAY! TREAT!! [stands on four feet to comfortably eat again] nom nom nom... Oh you bitch. Just the one? What is wrong with you?? I've done what you asked multiple times now. You should've showered me with treats!

There is something wrong with you. If you were not holding those treats that I kind of love, I would walk away rn, because I think you are broken and need to rest your very large head. You're not making sense. I'm making a conscious effort to be very, very patient with you rn because I'm a little afraid for you, honestly. You may not be well."

Obviously, I'm anthropomorphizing.

But it truly was a process for my cat to think through why on earth he had to do anything for me, in order to get anything from me. It did not come naturally at all - not the way that it does with dogs.

And though he sat faster on command over time, he always significantly paused to truly think about it. He had to. He did not have the thousands of years of adaptive/selectively bred slavish devotion to human whims in his genome or as a schema in his brain, the way that dogs do.

So instead of articles making fun of Larry the cat, who inaccurately and non-functionally replicates a trained dog's behavior - for reasons no one seems to have bothered to explore, possibly just for the joy and companionship of it, which the article also doesn't even consider -

Maybe we should try to understand why Larry did it, when no one made him, he had nothing to gain, and treats were not his end game.

Maybe we should try to understand cats as they are and stop comparing them to dogs, given their wildly different co-evolution with, and domestication by, humans.

*While you can expect dogs to be remarkably easy to train, you can't train a pointer to retrieve, for example. Working dogs have very specific skill sets and they're not good at translating those skills to other skills. I inadvertently tried to do that with my English Pointer, by getting him to try to retrieve sticks (I was still missing my black Lab who had passed).

He watched me throw the stick several times as I exhorted him to go "get it!", with this expression of "wtf, rilly?"... Then he finally, very slowly, went and picked up the stick, slowly walked back to me, and literally threw it at my feet. Then he laid down and refused to get back up until we went inside.

The implication could not have been clearer: "It's not that I don't understand you or that I can't do that. I don't do that, human. And this is the first and last time that I will ever retrieve anything for you: I'm showing you that I can, but I won't, because I'm not a retriever. I'm a Pointer. I point. That's what I do, that's my thing. Don't ask or expect me to do anything else. There are other dogs for that. And if that's what you wanted in a dog, you should've got one of them."

This was a smart dog. He showed me how smart he was - that he was smart enough to understand what I wanted/asked, and capable of doing it, but he was also smart enough to know that retrieving was not his job - not even in his wheelhouse, really - and he wasn't going to do it even though he understood exactly what I wanted.

He was incredibly easy to train. He wasn't housebroken when I got him, but that took only three days. He learned verbal commands effortlessly (up, down, off, paw, etc). Working dogs are very smart, and they learn quickly and easily. But! They also have minds of their own.