What about training cats?

What do you think? Does Pearl look like she'd put up with forceful punishment? I dont' think so!

A proposed criteria (by B.F. Skinner) for judging domestication is how well an animal responds to positive punishment. (Training jargon for adding something unpleasant, painful or scary to punish.) Dog, humans and horses as well as the often forgotten pigs, cows an chickens are fairly unique in that we will take abuse, and stick with their abuser. Wild animals will not.

This flies in the face of pop dog "psychology" which holds intimidation and physical force are necessary for training dogs because they are descended from wolves. Quite the opposite - not only are these methods unnecessary for dogs, they'd be useless and dangerous to use on wolves!

Cats don't quite meet this criteria for domestication. They won't do well with aversive punishment. Punish a cat and she will not come crawling back for more. Hence the myth of the un-trainable cat. If all you have in your training arsenal are punishment based methods you won't have much luck with most cats (or wolves or lions or tigers or bears, oh my!)

However, like all animals cats respond to reward-based methods.

Here is an excellent example:



or:



And another:



And another:



Or any of these!