I have a 65 pound English labrador. He smiles at me and licks out his tongue. He lets me know what he's planning when he wants to can catch someone he loves at the perfect moment. You can see the wheels turning. I really saw it during one surprising incident. Nothing is quite as surprising as when a man gets french kissed by a dog. I missed taking a shot of that Kodak moment. Since then, everyone makes sure that there is no leaning down next to this dog.
And that is the difference between a dog and a cat. I have never seen a cat come running for a kiss. In fact, it is a rarity for any of my cats to come running for anything. I once trained a cat to come down some stairs... albeit very slowly, by making sure that he would receive a spoonful of tuna when he arrived.
He was a big grey cat, named Smokey. The name fit him. For the first two weeks in the house, he would vanish into the closet when anyone blew into the room where he was lying. Three months later, you had to step over him to get into the room. There he would sit right in the middle of the doorway. And that is when I knew that I could train him.
The routine was repeated 3 times everyday.
Step 1 - walk into the room.
Step 2 - Go to the refrigerator.
Step 3 - Open the bag of tuna.
Step 4 - Take a plastic spoon, and ladle one large bite.
Step 5 - Close bag and return it to the refrigerator, and close the refrigerator.
Step 6 - Go to the stairwell and call the cat.
For the first week, I had to go to the cat and pass the tuna in front of his face. He would follow me, and I would feed him the tuna at the bottom of the stairs. In the beginning, the cat was extremely suspicious because I did not deliver the tuna to him. He would linger at the top of the stairs, take one step forward and then another back. If I called his name, he responded by sliding along the railing as if he were buttering the wood. Then finally sliding down the side of the stairwell until he took that one last step toward me. After a few weeks, I would call, he would sprint down those steps. I had to make sure that I always had some tuna, and deal with his wish for more. That cat was extremely attentive.
