Q: We have a 5-year-old red-and-white neutered male indoor cat named Charlie who is very vocal. He cries and yowls for something to eat whenever we are in the kitchen. He does not shut up until we give him something. This has become very annoying. We have tried to teach him not to do this by squirting him with water. He runs away as soon as we show him the water pistol (we do not even have to squirt him anymore), but a minute later he comes right back and does not give up until he gets something to eat. Is there any other way we can deter him?
A: In animals, punishment causes fear, stress or sometimes even aggression as it is hard for the animal to understand exactly what is wrong. Your cat has no idea why you are spraying it with water. It only has learned to fear the water pistol and has attributed it to just another inexplicable thing that the humans do in his little world.
The best way to modify such behaviors in animals is with extinction. You just have to withdraw all interactions with the cat whenever he yowls for food when you are in the kitchen. I would even advise you to feed the cat in a different room of the house so that there is no confusion at all.
Of course, this is very hard to do. The whole family has to join together to ignore the cat when he starts yowling, and it takes many weeks to accomplish this. If you ignore the cat for 10 days and then, on the 11th, you give in and feed it just to shut him up, you are back to square one. However, your cat is only 5, and house cats live a long time as a rule, so your choice here is to apply yourself to make the investment in time and patience or let him annoy you for the next 15 years or so.
Q: We have three indoor cats and they all get along well. One is 5, and we got two kittens over the summer. The older cat seems to be teaching the two kittens to open the drawers in our bedroom dresser. He always did this, and we thought it was cute. He would just open a drawer and crawl inside and go to sleep. But now we see the younger cats opening the drawers and pulling out all the clothes. The drawers do not slide very well, and we cannot imagine that they learned this through trial and error. We have had cats for the last 50 years and never saw a cat do this before. Is there anything we can do to stop this?
A: I doubt that the older cat consciously taught the younger ones to open the drawers, but the kittens did learn for themselves through what I call observational learning and what a scientist would call social learning. This always fascinates me as it is not a behavior that is taught or learned through trial and error. The behavior is performed spontaneously in its complete or near complete form after the animal has observed it being performed by another member of its social group.
I am not sure if this is mimicry or actual problem solving. Dogs have been proved in laboratory situations to mimic human actions, but to my knowledge this has yet to be proved with cats. At any rate, the problem is that your clothes wind up all over the floor. The same kind of locks that you put on cabinets to keep babies out of them are about all you can do here. I would also give the cats some kind of other enrichment that mimics the fun they have. A big cat tree with those carpeted tunnels on them is great, and even a simple thing like a few cardboard boxes with holes cut in the sides and half filled with crumpled newspapers is a good substitute for playing in clothes drawers.
Q: We got a baby guinea pig for Christmas for my son and we are very happy with him. We have a question about his feet: On his back feet he has three toes that seem fine, but on each foot is a very small toe that is loose and floppy and does not seem to work at all. Is this a big problem?
A: Guinea pigs typically have four toes on the two front feet and only three on the back, so those extra toes on the back feet that you see are vestigial toes that we call dew claws. Dew claws that occur on the back legs of any animal serve no purpose and usually cause few problems, but you have to keep a close eye on the nail since it is exposed to no friction and it tends to overgrow quickly and needs to be trimmed periodically by a person proficient in claw trimming such as a groomer or vet.
