Reddit reviews Cat Training in 10 Minutes

I'm going to recommend this book to you and your soon-to-be-enormous monster kitty.

Bengals are smart cats. They're also big. And yours has thumbs. You are likely to be outsmarted by your cat on a daily basis, so I recommend training and playing with him every day until he is too tired to move.

Also, there's nothing quite like having a cat who will stand on his hind legs and give you kisses on command. Very rewarding, and you end up thinking "sure, my cat can be a right dick sometimes... but that's because he's amazing."

There's a lot more out there now than there was when I started thinking about this stuff 15 years ago. Two books I found useful were this one and this one, both clicker-based. Karen Pryor, of dog clicker training fame, also has a book for cats, although I haven't read that one. Nowadays there are even YouTube channels devoted to cat training, and lots of good one-off videos for specific tricks too. I think I'd have used videos often if there'd been more of them at the time, because shaping does work somewhat differently than with dogs, and cats can be harder to read during training, so there is a bit of a learning curve.

For interactive play, I started out with just a laser pointer and basic "found toys," like dangling strings through holes cut into paper bags, or into boxes filled with crumpled paper. Eventually I discovered the Neko Flies rod toys, which you walk around swooshing in figure-8s through the air and above boxes, furniture, cat trees etc. I think they may be phasing these out now, which is unfortunate because they're a lot more durable than most toys of this type, and it's easy to change up which toy is on the rod, or to take a toy off the rod and run laps lashing it behind you for a change of pace.

It's all so basic really, and even then plenty of cats seem fine without any of it, but for me these things were key to shaking off my old (bad) habits of mind towards cats. I liked them, but I didn't really respect them, and a big part of that was that I'd never really experienced a mutually rewarding interaction with one beyond petting a purring cat when both I and the cat were in a good mood, which I assumed was all they were capable of.

> Cat Training in 10 Minutes

Disappointed that this is a book, not a 10 minute video.

http://www.amazon.com/Training-Minutes-Miriam-Fields-Babineau/dp/0793805309