Why Your Cat Thinks You’re a Huge, Unpredictable Ape

The idea that a creature that enjoys destroying your possessions, arbitrarily ignoring you for most of its life despite depending entirely upon you, expects total obedience despite no contribution or investment, has never earned a dollar in its life and has no concept of what a dollar is or why that might be important to it, intrinsically deserves anything so important as respect is ridiculous.

I'm not suggesting you leave your cat or your manager out to rot with the garbage (though I wouldn't argue, in most cases). But to suggest that either of these creatures, by default, deserves any measure of respect is hilarious to me.

And punishment works quite differently from reinforcement to begin with; it is typically less effective for far better socialized species such as humans and dogs, too.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning#Consequenc...

Domestic cats have been domesticated for a long time. Cats which live with humans (or even other cats - they do naturally form colonies) adopt a number of pro-social behaviours to interact with us.

They are in fact very adept at reading social cues - but conversely they are not pack-animals. They don't have the same instinctive need to identify a hierarchy of command, so much as "mess with" and "don't mess with".

[Edit] Changed negative reinforcement to punishment, rbehrends was correct when he pointed out that negative reinforcement is something different.

Positive and negative reinforcement patterns are not opposites, they're entirely separate processes.

(Cat owner here.)

For a dog, yelling is a punishment on its own, because they understand what the tone of voice means. A cat will just think "hmm, the human got louder - I wonder why?" If you're trying to punish a cat for things, you either need a physical stimulus they don't like (spray bottle, for example) or a social cue they understand (hissing is moderately effective, though that's more of a warning than a punishment).

I thought the same thing. I hate that any comment on a HN post adds to it's score. I would like this comment counted as a negative. This article is terrible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnbRoRmRV2c

(I normally don't watch long videos).

For two cats, we have three litter boxes that are cleaned daily, new litter is added every couple of weeks as the level of the litter goes down, and then the boxes are fully emptied and fresh litter added about every three months, and that keeps them mostly happy. Unfortunately, one of the cats will periodically pee outside the box even when the box is perfectly clean, and the reasons are many, and somewhat ambiguous.

Sometimes it's the litter. Either we're trying a new litter, or the manufacturer changes the litter, and the cat doesn't like the new litter for some reason.

Sometimes it's the environment. She's using the litter box and there's a sudden noise for some reason, and then she won't use that box again for a while. Not really a problem when we have three boxes, unless she's been startled while using all of them within a short period of time.

Sometimes she's feeling stressed out. If we rearrange the furniture, the seasons are changing (generally only going into winter does this seem to be a problem,) can't pay as much attention to her for a prolonged period of time, go on vacation, or bring home a new child, she's far more prone to peeing outside the litter box.

She never poops outside the litter box, only ever pees.

We've pretty much just formed a routine to minimize the peeing issues. We keep the litter boxes clean, we make sure we pay enough attention to her, and we try to encourage her to use her litter box at least once a day. If we haven't seen her pee in the litter box for a few days (does not mean she hasn't used it, just hasn't used it in front of us) we start to minimize the available options for her to pee in/on (easier than it sounds, she tries to find substitutes for her litter box, so anything box like, or that she can use to bury, like throw rugs.)

Several paragraphs to say "Your cat can't figure out negative reinforcement - their brains just can't handle it! Change the environment instead."

Then right next to that, it's all "You should give your cat positive reinforcement, that totally works!"

Not that it's bad advice to have positive reinforcement come from you and negative reinforcement come from the environment, but the explanation is poor.

The 6 month old Russian Blue? Not so much. I get the feeling that "negative reinforcement" doesn't apply to all cats all the time.

Your cat can no more learn not to do that, than it can control its sleep.

Get a litter box and clean up after your own damn pet.