A friend gave me this old book on cat training dated 1977. It’s called You Can Train Your Cat, by Jo and Paul Loeb.
Fear is the basic motivator here. Their justification is that female cats teach their kittens with “a smack of the paw or picking them up by the neck and shaking them.” (Frankly, I’ve only seen mother cats carry their young by the neck in emergency situations…and never arbitrarily shaking them.)
The first thing the Loebs teach is to scare your cat with a yell and a “slight tap on the cat’s rump” to teach it “right from wrong.” They describe their “rubber-arm technique,” which teaches the cat “that you can reach him no matter how far away you are.” For this, you throw something at the cat when it’s doing something you don’t like, in order to scare it into good behavior. If the behavior is really serious, like real aggression leading to injury, they say you should smack the cat to “let him have it before he lets you have it.”
They do recommend using rewards for what they call training. This involves repeatedly forcing the cat into positions, then giving it a food reward. If it doesn’t want to cooperate, you should force it to do so anyway. They say, “You must make him complete every command before treating him and letting him go.” The book is illustrated with photos of an elegant Abyssinian who looks like it belongs to the couple. With its flattened ears and half-closed eyes, this is clearly not a happy cat.
The kicker for me was their section on how to get a cat to respond to Come in an unfamiliar environment. They suggest locking your crated cat into a “small, secure room where he has never been before, from which he cannot escape, and with absolutely no place where he can hide,” because it’s “a real nuisance trying to drag a cat out from under a couch.” You then build an elaborate booby trap in one corner, let him out, sit by the crate and wait for him to go near the trap. That’s when you set it off, of course, so the cat runs to its crate for safety. You, the hero, snatch it up and comfort it. Then you repeat this several times. Even they call this method “shock-treatment training.”
OMG. The best thing I can say about the book: at least it’s out of print.
It’s so sad these trainers didn’t know about clicker training, where a cat can be taught to come–joyfully, with a grin on its face–in a matter of minutes. No forcing, no booby traps, no scaring the bejesus out of someone who should be your friend for life.
Paul Loeb went on to write more books on animal training, renaming his “rubber-arm technique” the Magic Touch. Loeb’s focus seems to be on dogs now; maybe the Magic Touch works fine on them. Only one of his other books has much to say about cats, The Heart of the Matter from 1999. There’s one story in it that fairly logically analyzes the steps that led to a cat becoming aggressive, from having to accept a new spouse in the house, to having to accept a new house, to having a raccoon threaten its catbox room. The Magic Touch is used with some rewards and affection to, apparently, rebalance the cat.
I think it’s a good story to show how much negative reinforcement it takes to turn a cat so aggressive it’s a threat to its human. I also think that only a cat strong enough to survive that kind of treatment and turn aggressive would be able to survive much application of Loeb’s Magic Touch punishment without having its relationship with its human affected negatively –and permanently.
