Guide to a Well-Behaved Cat

You must be friends with your cat in order to train it. Sorry - no miracles here. Phil Maggitti will teach you how to work with your cat, not how to overcome its basic nature and turn it into a dog that meows. That one sentence above perhaps best exemplifies why I love this book so much: Mr. Maggitti understands cats. And so will you, by the time you're done reading this book. Having problems convincing your cat to use the litter box? Maybe it would help to know why he isn't using it. In this book you'll get a guide to many of the reasons why cats stop using litter boxes. You'll also find a whole lot of suggestions for how to fix such problems. (Hint: stop scolding your cat. Start being sneakily manipulative instead!) You'll even find out why traditional recommendations for teaching your new kitten to use his box might do more harm than good. Having trouble getting your cat to sit still for grooming? There are two pages on that, including a guide to useful grooming products to have. There's information on how to clip a cat's claws safely (for both you and the cat), combing and brushing techniques, bathing your cat (although the book will point out that this shouldn't be necessary very often at all), routine ear care... and that's all before you get to "Basic Cat Training, Part I." You'll learn about bridging stimuli, intermittent reinforcement, and other simple concepts that are incredibly useful when trying to alter a cat's behavior. (To be honest, this book did a better job of explaining intermittent reinforcement schedules than my psychology textbook did!) You'll learn to see "misbehaviors" as natural cat behaviors, and then find ways to work with or around them to avoid future problems. There's a good discussion of possible motivations for training - which "tricks" you might want to teach for which reasons, and which tricks it's just silly to teach your cat if you don't have a reason for it. Mr. Maggitti did not write this book so that people could teach their cats stupid pet tricks - he wrote it so that we could better understand and live with our furred companions. I love the author's tone. He has a quirky sense of humor that lightens the dry material considerably. He has a strong sense of what is good and not good for a cat, but doesn't get condescending and overly-moralistic about it (so maybe people will be willing to listen to him). The sense of scathing sarcasm he applies to certain, ahem, "training aids" and training methods is well-deserved, and hopefully will help new cat owners to get a better sense of the appropriate treatment of a cat. The author very clearly has a deep understanding and appreciation of cats.