It takes a lot of effort to train an animal. You must provide a pleasant, exciting, and stimulating environment for it, as well as regularly watch and react to the animal’s desired and undesirable behaviors. You should also prepare yourself with patience. The procedure can also appear to be going in circles a lot of the time. Two steps forward and one step back… It could also happen on a whim and go unnoticed!
Samantha Bell, a cat specialist at Best Friends Animal Society, told us, “We’re all unintentionally training our pets all day long.” “We’re instructing them every time we interact with them.” The explanation for this inadvertent training is a phenomenon known as ‘operant conditioning,’ which states that “activity leads to a reward, which leads to more behavior.”
Samantha has firsthand experience with this inadvertent training: her cat Yohan hops on the counter while she prepares his meal. Samantha doesn’t want to upset him, so she speaks nicely to him and kisses him on the head as she places him on the ground. Yohan perceives leaping on the counter as a reward for his love of attention and head kisses. So, instead of teaching Yohan to get off the counter, Samantha mistakenly taught him to jump on it.
“I’m also a feline behavior expert. It occurs to the most well-intentioned of us ” she started.
Redditor u/shoonpo wanted to know more about this occurrence, so he asked r/AskReddit, “What have you unwittingly conditioned your pet to do?” The article has approximately 64,000 upvotes and 13,000 comments as of this writing, many of which are amusing stories like Samantha’s!
(h/t: boredpanda)
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