With a little help from the dog trainers, our revamped goals are:

Target
Come
Sit
Down
Down-Stay
Sit-Stay
Go-to-mat

With 3 cats to train, the vision of a sort of cat circus, with 2 of the 3 sitting on a mat waiting their turns while I worked the third, made perfect sense. So even though it’s at the bottom of the list, Go-to-mat is a priority. I just hadn’t worked out the details. (For someone with only one cat, other behaviors can obviously come first.)

In Pat Miller’s great clicker training book, The Power of Positive Dog Training, she talks about Stay having 3 parts: Duration, Distraction and Distance. Duration is adding time to the behavior. Distraction is changing the environment with things like location and position of trainer. Distance is adding space between you and the animal. They seemed like good advice for other behaviors too.

The mats were clearly too small for a whole cat to fit on them, even for petite Moxie. What did I want and why? 2 feet touching the mat? A rear-down Sit? Could I really expect two waiting cats to stay in a formal Sit for 10 minutes or so while I was working with the third? Wouldn’t it be a more realistic goal to ask for a Down? If a Down was my criteria, was it a sphinx Down or a flop Down? Did I let each cat’s natural inclination drive my final goal?

I definitely hadn’t required 100% for any behavior (Perfect Stimulus Control, in the language of Behaviorism) before I tried to add Duration with longer, intermittent reinforcement. Miller says to add Distance only after Duration and Distractions are working, but I had started to move around and away, adding both Distractions and Distance, after I got each of them up to only a few seconds on the mat. Too complicated, too soon!

For us, I decided the point of Go-to-mat is to give the non-trainers a comfortable place to wait until released. The Yahoo list suggests teaching Go-to-crate for this, but what with scratching posts, a tunnel and boxes of toys, I didn’t want two more Maine-Coon-sized crates crowding the living room. If they were waiting in a crate, they wouldn’t be in a perfect Sit the whole time. It seemed the most reachable goal would be a comfortable Down-Stay, either sphinx or flop. Then we could work on adding complications like Duration and Distractions.