The Well-Trained Pet Owner

Let me admit it right now. I am a well-trained pet owner.

When the guinea pig sqeals, I give her a treat. When the dog howls and yips like something is killing him, I let him in. When the cat knocks the food bin over, I pet her, fill her dish and apologize for letting it get empty.

Pavlov would be proud.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, to be exact, was the Russian physiologist whose work in the physiology of digestive glands, which included experiments training dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell, earned him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1904. He was the first in a long line of behaviorists both European and American who experimented, debated, pondered and published.

I learned about Pavlov in biology classes, but had I retained and applied what I learned, I might have avoided the clever traps my animals set for me over the years. I am convinced that pets apply the principles of conditioning with uncanny precision. Especially cats.

Let’s review the basic procedure for classical conditioning: Pavlov’s experiments conducted with dogs, food, and a bell. First there is the unconditioned stimulus (in this case food), i.e. something that elicits a response (salivation) the first time it is presented. That response is then called the unconditioned response, or the unthinking reaction to the stimulus. It's what will naturally happen when you present a dog with something tasty.

The concept is to present something completely unrelated first, like the ringing of a bell (call this the conditioned stimulus), that will elicit the same reaction or unconditioned response (salivation) even when the original stimulus (the food) is absent. If it works, it becomes a conditioned response: Bell rings, dog salivates.

It took Pavlov years of study, observation, and experimentation to figure this out, and science is still working to nail down this thing that our pets (especially cats) are born with.

Case in point: One day my black tom cat crawled under the bedcovers at five in the morning and sank his teeth into my big toe. I’ll call this action the unconditioned stimulus (biting). I launched out of bed, grabbed the animal, and sent him skittering out the front door – that would be my unconditioned response (rage). My naive logic in doing so, of course, was that I would teach him a lesson.

The next morning, when he wanted out, he crawled under the covers and bit me in the toe.

Did I remember Pavlov? Had I caught on, yet?

No. I sent him out again. 

Little did I realize that, at the first occurrence of this scenario, I was already doomed: Trained, conditioned, so the cat believed, to respond to toe biting by letting him out. Bite the toe, go outside.

Conditioning was in the feline vocabulary long before Pavlov came around.

“…cats are trainable and make good trainers,” according to Diana Clement of PetBehavior.com. Diana holds a master’s degree in psychology and has worked training animals and their owners for fifteen years. According to Diana, “Associations between events are all that is required for training, and most living creatures survive by making such associations correctly.”

I ran the following example by Diana: One day my aunt heard a ruckus in the kitchen. When she went to check it out, she found their tabby cat knocking spice jars off the shelf. They clattered into the porcelain sink much to the apparent delight of the cat. My aunt, being of the same Irish blood as the rest of our clan, yelled, shoo’ed and scolded. She was doing fine until her daughter arrived, picked up “poor kitty”, and proceeded to open a can of her favorite cat food.

My aunt eventually conceded defeat and moved the spice jars into a cupboard.

So what could she have done to correct this behavior? Diana told me “never ever” feed the cat after she’s done something naughty. “…anything that leads to food is usually resistant to extinction” (the process of eliminating the unwanted behavior). Diana suggested a new association. “Every time the cat knocks down the spice jars, it’s time to trim her nails or give her a flea spray. If at the same time you make a new association with food, such as whenever you see the cat lying on the window sill you feed her, you can modify her behavior quickly. She will learn the spice jars result in activities she does not want and lying on the window sill now earns food.”

But let’s get back to my oh-so-clever tom. I reacted as any self-respecting human would with the “I’m smarter than any blamed cat” attitude and attempted to achieve extinction. I knew at the time the conditioned stimulus (biting) and the resulting conditioned response (going out) needed to stop, though ‘extinction’ was not in my vocabulary.

I rolled my feet in the blankets so he couldn’t get to them.

Oh, how he tried. I felt him probing fiercely with his nose for a weak spot in my defenses. Just when I was dropping off again in a fog of self-satisfaction, I woke to a nasty scratch in the nose. Diana explains, “This is called an extinction burst of behavior. Most people give in at this point, which reinforces the behavior exponentially. For reasons we don’t fully understand, behavior becomes more frequent, when the reinforcement does not occur every time.” Translation: I was doomed.

Now aware of the consequences of responding by throwing him out, I took to leaving him outside the bedroom at night. Pavlov was still buried somewhere in my synapses, but at least my mistake was obvious.

I want to stress, here, that this animal had all the love and affection a cat can get. He slept on my bed! I love cats. I have had one or more cats all my life. I adore them. I love the way they purr, the way they rub up against you like you’re the only human for them and drool on you when the ecstasy consumes them. And I have always appreciated their unique intelligence. But this cat’s behavior went beyond high IQ. I know he carefully calculated his next move and watched for the one thing that would achieve compliance on my part and restore my conditioned response.

He turned to urinating in the house. Not randomly relieving himself out of necessity; not the kind of territorial marking that male cats engage in.

Puddles. All my favorite things became targets: My reading chair, my comforter, my dirty clothes, my bathtub. In response I began to keep the cat box immaculate, cleaning it out daily as opposed to the usual every-two-or-three-day schedule.

This, however, was not about the litter box.

I caved. As soon as I let him have his way, the urinating ceased. I lived with that cat for eight years, and for eight years I woke to the alarm clock at five in the morning to let him out. As if to thank me for being such an obedient owner, he would bring me a mouse or a bird for breakfast. In other words, he not only conditioned me effectively, he used positive reinforcement to keep me toeing the line.

Should I have tried punishment? According to Diana, that is the one thing cats will never respond to. “Dogs and horses used to be trained with a great deal of physical punishment about thirty years ago. This type of training was unsuccessful with cats, because cats become aggressive or withdrawn when threatened.” She adds, “Punishment doesn’t teach a cat to change her behavior. If the cat is punished (chased or threatened), she will learn that the trainer is the source of punishment, because punishment does not occur when no one is around.”

So how do you avoid accidental conditioning? Diana recommends "Be aware of your pet’s point of view in many circumstances. Most important is to be aware of your pet’s behavior patterns early on, so that if an undesirable association is beginning to take root, you can change it by breaking the routine.”

Do they condition us? Believe it.

Are they capable of positive and negative reinforcement? I am convinced. Maybe you’re not quite, but there is one thing of which I am certain: Our loving, devoted, amusing and cuddly animals are smart and devious. They understood the principles of conditioning and reinforcement long before Pavlov and Skinner. If you’re not careful, they’ll have you right where they want you.

While I still miss that cat and his antics, I certainly do not miss the five AM alarm. If I had known then what I know now, I might have had a chance. Nowadays I live with two outdoor cats, two caged parakeets, an extremely vocal guinea pig, and a howling dog. It’s too late for me, but maybe now you’ll have a fighting chance.

Next time your cat/dog/cockatiel/ferret does something annoying, make sure your next move is something undesirable. In the case of a very clever cat, you might want to keep some flea spray handy.

Note from the author: This piece was originally written in 2001. This is its first publication. I could not find the original petbehavior.com website and assume the name changed.

In the intervening years the guinea pig, the cats, the dog and the parakeets have passed on. Today our household is blessed with one fun-loving Labradoodle, who, it seems, is content with family life without conditioning everyone in the household.

My two teenagers are another story…