Cat training is not always easy, but it is possible.
Though your cat may seem too independent and
stubborn to change its behavior, you can get the
job done if you make a commitment to the right strategies.

There are a few basic tents of successful training
about whichever cat owner should be aware.
Let us look at three of those cat training fundamentals:

The Need for Immediacy

Cats are incredibly smart animals,
but they do not necessarily make the same kind of
connections people do with respect to cause and effect.
That is why it is essential to take action
immediately when you observe inappropriate behavior.
If your response is delayed by even a few seconds,
it will lose a great deal of its effectiveness.

Never assume that your cat will remember
what it did earlier in a day or that the cat
will make any connection between your discipline
and past behavior. Rarely, if ever,
will that happen. If you correct your pet
for something it did earlier, it will have
no idea of why it is being corrected and may incorrectly
link your actions to the behavior displayed
immediately before you took action.

Encouraging Alternative Behaviors

One of the best ways to teach your cat
not to engage in an undesirable behavior is to encourage
the animal to do something else instead.
This strategy works even better when the encouraged
behavior is completely incompatible with
the undesired action. This technique works because cats,
like all animals, are more responsive to
positive reinforcement.

You will have greater success encouraging and rewarding
what you would like to see than you will by
trying to stop what you do not.
Instead of discouraging your cat from scratching
a table leg, encourage your pet to exercise
that instinct on its scratching post!

Avoiding Physical Discipline

Physical punishment will not contribute to successful
cat training. Negative reinforcements do not work
well for cats and hitting or otherwise physically
reprimanding your pet will only make your relationship
more difficult while inspiring unnecessary
fear in the animal.

Cats are not always the easiest animals to train,
but if one approaches the project with the right
attitude and strategies, it is possible
to direct a cat's behavior. The three elements
of cat training we've discussed all share
features common to all successful techniques--they are all
based on the understanding that positive reinforcement
offers the greatest chance of success and that cat owners
should always use the least aggressive means
of correcting behavior.

Those three rules of thumb are at the
very core of smart cat training.

Article Source:
http://www.articlesbase.com/pets-articles
/successful-cat-training-3-rules-to-follow-90654.html

About the Author:
This article was written by Liz Barton.
Learn more about how to solve your cat behavior problems
- you'll find another cat training
article by visiting
http://www.secretsofcats.com/training_cats.html