Most of us are familiar with Pavlov’s dogs. In short, Ivan Pavlov, who was studying digestive processes, would ring a bell and present dogs with food. He soon realized that the dogs would begin salivating when the bell rang, even if no food was present. This is what became known as classical conditioning and helped develop the school of behavioral psychology.

A few months ago, I realized I have accidentally trained our cats similarly, even though no food is involved. We have two Ring devices: our front doorbell, and motion-activated floodlight which covers our carport and back steps. I have the Ring app on my phone and have different alert tones assigned to each device so I’ll know which one I need to check when a notification sounds. The cats have learned that when the tone for the carport sounds, it is frequently followed by someone coming to the front door. It’s funny to watch them. When the carport alert sounds, they either run for the door and look out the windows in the sidelight to see who’s coming or just sit up and look at the front door. Actually, I’m pretty impressed that they put all of this together on their own.

On another note, I found myself in need of Mark Petruska’s (as yet non-existent) cat scratcher business this weekend. As the owners of multiple cats, we have a variety of cat scratchers and cat trees scattered around the house. When the scratchers wear out, we generally buy a new one. At one point, we bought sisal with plans to just repair the scratcher. Well, I have no idea where the sisal went, and we never did repair that scratching post. When I was vacuuming last week, I found a mystery substance on the floor. I soon determined that the cats had scratched through the rope on the scratching post and were now in the process of destroying the cardboard tube that functions as the base of the scratcher. I assembled the replacement cat tree over the weekend, a process which required a lot of feline “assistance.”

I hereby pinky swear that next time, I will repair the scratching post, not replace the whole cat tree/scratcher.

What behaviors have your pets learned without training?