Re: OT: There I was, watching PBS . . .

{chuckle} The fans of Gambian (and other kinds of) rats (as pets, not
pests) also have started some informal competition in agility. Wish I
could find the site again....

More and more cat shows are offering feline agility competition, one of
the gals in our dog-ladies gang told us this AM when we were talking
about this. She has couple of cat breeder friends who do this.

Yes, the kittens do do better at a trained event. And should do better
at it as adults than adults that were introduced to formal education
later in life. A method often used is "clicker training", an
all-positive method of teaching that also invoves the use of food as a
reward. With cats, small spoons with canned food are used most of the
time.

One popular seminar that teaches clicker training pairs students with a
chicken apiece... Live chicken, not Southern fried.... to help them
master timing, so the verification of success by the animal in
performing a command (click) is given at exactly the right time, and the
reward (usually food, but in some animals can be a toy or ball) is also
given at the optimum time. This has made it possible to teach many
skills to animals that otherwise were resistant to obeying humans. With
cats, it's the motivation of the food that makes lots of training almost
"easy". (Yeh, riiiiiight) If the cat wants the food, it's gotta produce
the correct response.

Ya had to bring this up.... I teach dog obedience, and clicker work is
now a "standard" tool in teaching precision response in competition
obedience, family pet training, agility.... and even law enforcement and
search and rescue training for dogs.

Jo Wolf
Martinez, Georgia

.

Relevant Pages

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