This video clip offers the best advice for not only cat owners but for any pet owner: set your pet up to succeed. How? Make sure that the antecedents are reflective of effective practice. If the environment in any way encourages unwanted behavior, it needs to be altered so that appropriate behaviors more easily develop.
Reward good behavior. Ignore bad behavior. Why? Any kind of reaction to undesirable behavior is potential reinforcement. Whenever we want to extinguish the undesirable behavior, we put the behavior on extinction so as not to provide any reinforcement. If each and every pet owner or potential pet owner was familiar with these sage words, more pets would be successful and well behaved in their environment and perhaps fewer would end up in shelters...or worse.
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