Think of the aisles as the behaviors. “When a cat scratches their scratching post” is one aisle. “When a cat comes at the sound of the can opener,” is another aisle.
When the cat’s mind zips its little forklift down that aisle, there’s two ways they can think of what happens after that behavior. On one side is everything good that happened when they did that. On the other side is everything bad that happened. The bigger the box, the more good or bad it was.
So when the cat goes looking for “can opener sound,” there should be many many lovely big boxes. There’s a few on the bad side of the aisle, but they are small, the times the cat came for green beans and went away disappointed.
That’s why the cat always comes. Because it’s not terrible if it’s not for them, and so good when it is for them.
Then there’s the vacuum cleaner. No good comes of this, and it’s terribly loud to a cat. That’s why, when we bought a new vacuum, Mr. Bond recognized the picture on the closed box and refused to investigate.
That’s why we can’t train with punitive methods. The bad things are so overwhelming the cat forklift can’t even get down the aisle. It does not leave much room for us to wedge in good events to make up for it. Better to not clutter up that aisle in the first place.
The cat remembers every event. Not in every detail, and not so they could pick out dates on the calendar, but they certainly keep track.
They use the Cat Database.
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