Teaching cats tricks

My roomie introduced me to the idea that you can teach a cat tricks. She has a cat that falls over when she aims her hand like a gun and says "bang" and another one who sits up "begging" on command. (when she says "up")
She has started teaching my boy cat to do the "up" trick and to do a "twirl" trick where he goes in a circle (she twirls her hand to get him to do it)
The key, apparently, is to use some natural behaviors of the cat and reward heavily with food or treats.
Has anyone else trained their cat to do tricks?

 

I haven't been training mine even though one of them does retrieve toys if you throw them for him to fetch. We didn't teach him that, he just started returning them one day.

 

I have not taught any of the tribe to do tricks, but like Yolanda, one of mine, Edge, does play fetch. I think he does this so that none of the others snatch the toy from him though, Precious is good at acting as if she wants to hit the toy back and forth to play with him but then she runs away with the toy so I always thought Edge would run back to me with the toy as a way of avoiding Precious.

 

I have never taught my cat to do any tricks, but would like to teach her to do some once I figure out how to get her to do any. She does play fetch though and learned that on her own. I will throw one of her toys to her and she will bring it right back. She started playing with straws and would chew on them at first then run after them when I played with her and then started bringing it back when I would throw it. She does this with any of her regular toys now.

 

I have one cat, that we have trained to scratch my husbands knee. He says I got a itch and the cat will come over and put her paws up there and scratch his knee lol! It is really cute and funny!

 

The only trick I have been able to teach my cat is to sleep in my lap. Actually that didn't take any teaching. I am happy that my cat is happy to be with me.

 

Fetch does sound like a good one to teach a cat. I will have to try to see if I can get mine to do that, too.

 

That would be a first. I could never teach any of my cats to fetch. When I throw something to them, they will run away with it and play with it. Never brought it back to me.

 

I'm trying to train our cats to do a few simple tricks. They definitely have learned some responses to certain commands, but don't do anything very reliably yet.

 

The only command that my cats respond to is "Come". That's mainly because I say that when I am feeding them.

 

My cats seem to teach themselves tricks, like opening cupboard doors lol. My husband did teach our first kitten to fetch like a dog....

 

My aunt's cat Shadow learned to open the doors to under the sink. He would open them and somehow shut them.. just fall asleep under the sink. Of course she couldn't keep any chemicals under there, but I found it funny that he would do that without anyone teaching him.

 

That sounds like one of my cats, he lays on his back under the cupboard and uses his paws to open it and then gets in. That is usually the cupboard under our sink too

 

We noticed my cat Jackie loved going in her kennel so we started telling her to go to bed when she was already heading into the kennel, and then we would reward her, now if we say bed nine out of ten times she goes into her kennel and lays down.

 

I have never trained a cat to do tricks...that is so neat! But as I mentioned in another thread, my youngest cat Riff does wait for permission from me to climb on my chest for snuggling, so I suspect he may be a good candidate for a trick of some sort, but don't know if I have the patience....I will just call what he does a "trick" ha ha.