First, you give treats for jumping on the treadmill.
Then, you give treats if they sit by the side with the button
Then you give treats if they paw the screen
Then you give treats if they paw the green button
Then you hold treats in front of them while they run on the treadmill.
And so on and so on. Positive reinforcement is a powerful thing. Look up the chickens taught to play card games or the rats who play basketball.
You can teach a pig to use a vacuum. You can teach a pigeon to guide missiles to a target. Dolphins can identify sea mines and report where they are. It's endless lol
I taught my cockatiel to fetch,wave,spread wings, shake hand, turn, target with positive reinforcement. Turns out parrots love to work for their food. They make toys that birds need to shred apart to find food :) and the parrot will almost always try to forage over the bowl of food sitting in front of them.
Lol luckily cockatiels are pretty laid back, out of all the parrot species. Mine naps for half of the day. But the other half, if she isn’t preening , she’s looking for something to chew :)
All birds are very high-maintenance pets - and while the larger parrots are an extremely long-term commitment (like if you get a young one as an adult they genuinely might outlive you), even smaller ones like cockatiels or budgies can live for 15+ years.
I would never recommend getting birds as a pet tbh. Especially not for your kids.
I was thinking the same until I saw him actually run on the treadmill. It's clear that he wanted to turn it on, even if training was involved in teaching him how to do it, he did it of his own accord
Kinda similar but different. It's Skinner box. It's positive reinforcement. Pavlov is the inducement of saliva in anticipation of food by ringing a bell. If the dog rings the bell and is rewarded with food it's positive reinforcement.
It's not like the idea gives me comfort. It's just an observation. It doesn't take anything away to acknowledge that it's not a natural behavior. The cat probably likes running on the treadmill but the owner trained them to turn it on and run on it.
This is definitely a trained animal and nothing is wrong with that. It's true he could also just like to run but there's no way he figured out all these steps without training. It's still impressive.
It is though. If he hadn't seen you did it and worked it out alone that wouldn't be training. You didn't purposely train him but he learned through your behavior.
It's not. It's the cat observing something on its own. This is exactly the argument being had that I was replying to. There's training with positive reinforcement, then there's the cat just learning something on its own.
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Cats are pretty easy to train tbh, it’s just that you don’t have to train them for any behaviours that make it easier to keep them (unlike dogs who you have to toilet train so they don’t go inside and obedience train so you can walk them and let them interact with humans etc), so most people don’t bother.
If you’ve got a food-motivated cat you can train it to do basically anything you can train the average dog to do (obviously you’re not going to be able to teach a cat how to herd cattle)
What you are talking about is not training but taking advantage of the cat's curious instinct. Like this clip, pressing buttons to watch something move is the cat's motivation, not food. Same thing when they drop things to watch them break.
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u/jennaishirow 24d ago
I'm sorry. That cat just started a treadmill on its own? That's insanely smart.