8 ms·
Don't feed your cat until 7am no matter what. Ignore all foot rubs and meows. He'll eventually learn and give up. Operant conditioning. Watch out though for t
by astral303 10y ago
Don't feed your cat until 7am no matter what. Ignore all foot rubs and meows. He'll eventually learn and give up.
Operant conditioning.
Watch out though for that extra-hard last ditch effort he will put out before giving up. Stay strong.
- bartkappenburg 10y agoThat last ditch effort is called an extinction burst [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)#Extinction_burst https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)#Exti...
- iamphilrae 10y agoUntil I read the article, I was imagining this: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/003/312/014/af9095d403701c14e49f9394d77af050_original.png?w=1200&fit=max&v=1424394523&auto=format&q=92&s=2691a94aa51505e2233603c571e863d0 https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/003/312/014/af9095d403701c1...
- dboreham 10y agoIt you want to see extinction bursts, just watch Trump for a while.
- derekp7 10y agoCats have been known to modify their purring sounds, to include a sub-carrier that is remarkably similar to an infant crying. That in turn triggers an instinctive response in humans which cause them to subconsciously rise out of bed and apply food to the source of that sound. Source: a documentary on Netflix "The Lion in your Living room".
- mschuster91 10y agoWell my cats don't need their (damn loud nonetheless) voices to wake me up... the fat cat (7kg) wakes me up by bashing me with full paw force. Cats are awesome, especially at finding our weaknesses...
- bitwize 10y agoCats have also been known to resort to terrorism, viz., climbing onto high shelves and systematically knocking fragile items to the floor until their demands are met.
- eric_h 10y agoHa! Yes they do - I just posted an anecdote describing this very behavior https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233945
- bitwize 10y agoIt's apparently so common that there's a game -- Catlateral Damage -- where you play a cat from a first-person perspective and score by knocking as many things to the floor as you can in a set time.
- robhu 10y agoI thought it was that modern house cats have evolved to have their purring contain that similar sound, rather than that they selectively enable a sub-carrier.
- arethuza 10y agoOne of our cats has managed to perfect saying something that sounds awfully like a distressed young child crying "mum" - I'm immune to this but it upsets my wife!
- jevinskie 10y agoI already refuse to feed him before 7am but he still tries. He is conditioned on getting breakfast from Dad and I need to condition him to get breakfast from the machine. I'm hoping that loading it with breakfast the night before and a lock indicator LED will remove Dad from the picture and allow for that conditioning.
- Goronmon 10y agoDon't feed your cat until 7am no matter what. Ignore all foot rubs and meows. He'll eventually learn and give up. He'll maybe learn to give up. Or he's like one of our cats where we have to install a baby gate on the outside of the closed door to our bedroom to make it difficult for him to bang on the door all night/morning so that we can sleep.
- AlexCoventry 10y agoSome mild punishment may be necessary. If a cat bothers me while I'm in bed, they get held by their scruff and moved to the floor. The cats bother my wife, but not me.
- peatmoss 10y agoWe lock our cat out of the bedroom at night (and have since day 1), and own a cat feeder. Cat ownership bliss.
- Goronmon 10y agoHe's kind of a weirdo. He just sees punishment as mostly "attention" and doesn't mind it that much. Plus, any movement towards him in the morning is seen as "I must be getting fed now!" and he gets all excited.
- massysett 10y agoWe tried this with our cat for years. He had a designated feeding time. We never broke it. His internal clock is pretty good but not exact, so he starts to pester for food an hour or two before feeding time. So he would surely wake us up if fed at 7:00am, so one solution is to feed at night. This results in a cat constantly underfoot begging for food for two hours, which is literally a tripping hazard. The solution is to feed him from a machine and to make sure he never sees us touching the machine. Now, at feeding time he sits by the machine and stares at it, waiting for it to open.
- e40 10y agoSo, your cat transferred all their respect for you to the machine.
- DonHopkins 10y agoI love the way my cats stare at me worshipfully, and I'd envy the machine.
- AlexCoventry 10y ago> This results in a cat constantly underfoot begging for food > for two hours, which is literally a tripping hazard. We found a solution to this: Only feed the cat when an audible alarm goes off. This way they associate the onset of food behavior with the alarm, not with you.
- coreymaass 10y agoBefore putting the dish down, require that the cat lay on a designated mat. If s/he moves, pick up the dish. Eventually the cat should learn to lay on the mat for the hour before mealtime, rather than bugging you. Worked for both my dog and my cat.
- ghostly_s 10y agoHow on earth do you get the cat to lay on the mat the first time?
- silencio 10y agoHow long is "eventually"? My cat is almost 5 years old. She is the type to overeat to obesity, probably because she was abandoned at ~1yr by her previous owner. For half her life my partner and I have been feeding her like clockwork 3 times a day, minus all of 2-3 weeks of vacations where our roommate took over. I have to exert a constant effort to maintain our bedroom door and the rubber that I lined on the jamb to prevent her from rattling the door at 5am to ask for food - the paint is a lost cause. We have a white noise machine. We ignore her cries for food. We ignore her pawing things off our desks. We have a system to keep track of food we give her so she can't "trick" the other person. She knows exactly when we feed her (the meows get cranked up a notch about an hour before food time) but despite not giving in, she keeps acting like meowing at us is going to go anywhere. No luck. And we know we're not underfeeding her - she's getting the calories appropriate for her (currently normal) weight, is being fed wet food, has fresh water, lots of attention and toys, all that stuff. Unfortunately we have to give this up because we've got a baby on the way, and it's just so frustrating to lose 2+ years of effort put into having her not weigh 18lbs...
- matt_kantor 10y agoTry an automatic feeder. I have the one mentioned in the article and didn't need to do any extra hardening to protect it from our two cats. Even though we kept a tight feeding schedule, our cats used to start meowing and pestering us an hour before dinner time. Now, they just sit quietly and stare at the automatic feeder until it dispenses their food.
- silencio 10y agoThat's our eventual plan! I haven't ordered one yet since all of them have reviews about cats being able to open them up plus I have to figure out how to transition to a dry food diet again. Mine will paw at the sealed container of bonito flakes we use as treats... I'm 110% counting on needing to harden a feeder.
- peatmoss 10y agoSecond this. Our cat was clearly able to outlast my patience. At one point early-ish into our cat's tenure in our home, during a particularly persistent meowing session I said to my wife (jokingly!), "holy shit I'm going to kill this cat." To which I quickly had the sad realization that some people probably do abuse or kill their pets. So I decided to check for advice from the ASPCA. All the kitty guides on webbernets say, "be firm and don't give into kitty's demands." Whereas I read on the ASPCA website, "buy an automated feeder." Guess which worked? Happy automated cat feeder owner, and our cat mostly doesn't drive me insane around feeding times. For reference, I also own this model of cat feeder and have not needed to harden, though I do have it wedged up next to a wall to lessen risk of tipping.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoMy cat is 18. She howls in the middle of the night to get us to play with her and bites at us when she feels too much time has elapsed since her last saucer of milk. She is way too old to give a fuck anymore and there is nothing to indicate she will ever change at her age. Just like a human.
- dubya 10y agoMy inlaws have a bird clock, the kind that plays a different bird song at each hour. Cats figure out which birds to listen for.
- Sander_Marechal 10y ago7am? I tried that, and they would still wake me up. I switched to evening feedings instead. My cats get fed at 9pm sharp. They only get one feeding per day and they usually make it last. That means there's still food in their bowls in the morning. It took them a few weeks to get used to it, but now we don't get woken up by the cats anymore. Well, they still jump on the bed and want a cuddle, but no more annoying crying for food.
- lostlogin 10y agoWe are 12 years in and the cat is howling away. Same feed time everyday. She is evil. If her dinner is felt to be sub par she goes into the sleeping child and claws the kid. She has come very close to a final vet visit with this behaviour.
- allergeek 10y agoHey, try vinyl claw caps first. Google: cat vinyl nail caps Animals are complex machines, just as people are. They are mirroring a lot of our traits, as anger or ignorance. As a final resort, give the cat up by letting someone adopt it. That actually works! Good luck!