Meowing and other demanding behaviour

Cats meow for a whole range of reasons. At least three quarters of them meow partly in order to give their owners instructions. Cats are excellent teachers when it comes to concentration, persistence and patience. Once they have devoted themselves to something — training you to open the door on command, say, or teaching you to get up early in the morning and feed them — they give themselves to it wholeheartedly.

They are not distracted. They do not give way. They do not tell you that you are stupid, spiteful, stubborn or hard to deal with. They simply sit and meow, and meow, and meow! Quite possibly without meaning to, you give in to this training of yours when you open the door or get out of bed to serve their breakfast. When that happens, your cat says to itself: “Ah, slowly perhaps, but she does understand what is wanted of her after all. Very well, I shall work with her some more tomorrow.”

Here are the rules that will let you change your cat’s habit of meowing to get what it wants.

From this moment on you will not respond to your cat’s meowing. Or at least you will try not to. If you have made up your mind to sit the meowing out, then sit it out you must. Punish the cat or ignore it. Put on headphones. Do not give way! The worst thing you can do is to wait about ten minutes and then get to work under pressure from the cat. Do that and all you will teach the cat is to meow for ten minutes or more every time. A bad lesson!

If you are going to give way anyway, give way sooner! Be realistic: if you have a long hard day behind you, if you are simply not in the mood or are down with flu — in short, if for any reason you know that today you cannot stand it — then for goodness’ sake give the cat what it wants at once! At least you will not be rewarding persistence in this behaviour. It is far easier to live with a cat that meows for thirty seconds than with one that meows for several minutes on end.

How to punish a meowing cat

There are several ways of punishing a noisy cat. The easiest and most time-tested are to use water or a noise to break its train of thought. Say your cat is staring at you and meowing. At once, and with all possible care, throw a metal tin of coins in the cat’s direction. Aim carefully so as not to hit the cat. Meowing is annoying, of course, but it is not the kind of crime one takes a life for. When the tin lands, the cat will get a fright.

After a few seconds of silence, call the cat over to you. Praise it and give it a treat. That way you reward it for silence and assure it that all is well. Besides, you show it that you had nothing whatever to do with that noisy object which fell as though out of the sky — that sort of thing simply always happens to noisy cats.

Distract your cat

Sometimes a strong attack really is the best defence. Start some noisy game when you see that your cat is getting ready to meow. The game will give it the mental and physical exercise it needs so badly, and it will drive every problem clean out of its head as well.

Reward the behaviour you want

Besides praising the cat after a punishment, you should try to notice when it is being quiet and reward it for that. This takes a sharp eye and a patient nature, but a well-timed reward for quiet behaviour can sow a seed in the cat’s head.

It is not always easy to notice that your cat is being quiet and undemanding. If you are busy all day, it often turns out that only the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But if you have had enough of that squeaky wheel, you will have to make yourself watch the cat closely and catch what is so easy to miss. Then you will be rewarding the cat for ordinary behaviour and waiting for the miracle — for it to learn at last how to behave.

Punishing a demanding cat

Your cat is in front of you twenty-four hours a day. It lies above your head while you sleep, it settles down on your very newspaper while you are trying to read, it helps you make the bed, it bats at the shower curtain while you wash, it licks up the drops while you brush your teeth, and generally fills your entire day.

Most of the time you are delighted by all this, but there are times when you want to do something without cat hair getting into it. Here is how to manage that without your four-legged friend feeling shut out.

Teach your cat

The good news is that your cat is exceptionally clever. The bad news is also that your cat is exceptionally clever. It wants desperately to communicate with you and spends a great deal of time trying. It would be excellent if the two of you worked out a vocabulary between you. It is a fine way to develop the cat’s mind, and a foundation for steering its behaviour into more positive and welcome channels.

Think up some tricks you would like to teach your cat and work on them. The best thing about training a cat is that it makes no difference at all how long it takes: two days or two weeks. What of it? This is not a race. Have fun, take it easy, enjoy yourselves!

Keep your cat amused

There are exercises made for the purpose. Cats, especially the most energetic ones, usually exercise themselves. It is not always the kind of exercise one would wish for, though. So, to head off unwanted behaviour and to release pent-up tension, roll table tennis balls across the floor and have some fun with your cat. Divide its toys into three sets and put out a new set every few days. Make a particular point of playing with your cat for at least fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen in the evening.

Find your cat a friend

Two cats will keep each other amused. Two kittens brought up together become all but inseparable. A kitten raised with a brother or a sister is less likely to turn into a demanding cat than one raised alone.

Make your peace with the inevitable

If you have got yourself a Siamese or an Abyssinian, do not come to us afterwards complaining that it is so full of energy. That is like complaining that a Ferrari goes too fast. If you do not want a fast car, do not buy one built for speed. If you do not want a cat that needs to be fully part of your life and will demand it, do not get a breed that is famous for exactly that.

Set the house rules

A cat does have a notion of boundaries. Those boundaries simply have to be presented in a way that makes sense to it. If you merely tell the cat that it must not go somewhere because you would be glad if it did not, that will not work. You will have to come up with a weightier reason.

It is far more effective to make the place look dangerous to the cat. You can make a place seem dangerous by setting traps there or by punishing the cat every time it turns up in it. If your cat pesters you while you are having a snack in front of the television, do not let it climb onto the sofa at those times. Give it the command “Away!” and use a jet of water or air, or a loud noise, to punish it every time it disobeys. The moment it jumps off the sofa, praise it. After all, that is exactly what you wanted, is it not?

If you are inconsistent about this, you will create a still more terrible monster than you had before. So once you have taken a position, hold it! Do not start talking nonsense. Your cat has quite enough trouble understanding people as it is, without your being indecisive on top of everything else! If you cannot enforce the house rules yourself, how can you expect your cat to keep them?

Keep calm

For goodness’ sake, keep calm! If you have decided that the time has come for your cat to change its habits, that does not mean the cat agrees with you! You have probably been putting up with the behaviour for some time already, so take a deep breath and relax. Habits that have taken root over many months will not vanish in a day! There is no magic in animal training. The work is done mainly by large doses of consistency, persistence and rewards. That does not mean the habit cannot be dealt with in a short time. You simply must not expect the cat to stop trying to behave as it is used to, immediately and completely — especially if those attempts have been working for so long!