Cat agility athletes (Photo courtesy of Conscious Companion).
Ever wonder how you can get your cat to stop shredding your couch? No longer climb all over your counters? Maybe eliminate the overnight yowling and zoomies on your bed? As a cat mother of three, this sounded like a distant dream to me.
That is, until the sport of cat agility entered my radar. It is like dog agility, but better. What is the only thing that is possibly better than cat agility? My collection of articles here.
The Typical Cat Agility Course
Every good agility course consists of a few key ingredients. This includes hurdles, hoop jumps, tunnels, and weave poles.
The materials for the course can range from the prestigious tournament-grade agility type to cardboard and PVC pipe. It’s more about the components of the course than the material.
If you lack handyman skills like me, there are websites that spell out how to build the equipment and provide resources on where to buy things.
Cats Rule, Dogs Drool
Cats are better agility performers than dogs, and here are some key reasons why:
- Cats are FAST. The average house cat can run 30 miles per hour (they haven’t met my Chonky boy) and can keep up with grizzly bears.
- A cat can jump six times its height. Which is roughly 24 times higher than the average human, based on their height.
- Cats have a short-term memory of 16 hours. This is in contrast to dogs, whose memory is roughly 10 minutes. It is also about 16 times as long as me on a good day. This length of memory allows the cat to learn the agility course thoroughly and practice repeatedly.
- The feline may be blind as a bat when it comes to things far away, but they can see things well that are close by. This sets them up well for tackling the individual obstacles that make up the course.
“Training” Cats for Agility
Any cat owner knows that there is no such thing as training a cat to do anything. A better way of saying it would be heavily incentivized persuasion with a healthy side of begging.
The fact that a cat only does things that they want to do instead of seeking human approval can give a person greater satisfaction when their cat finishes an agility course versus a dog.
Top Three “Training” Methods
According to experienced “trainers,” there are a few accepted methods to get a cat to give the course a try. None of them included covering the course with treats and trying to help the cat through it while they floated on the floor in front of the first obstacle. I must be doing it wrong.
The primary method is described as “luring” or enticing a cat through the course with a toy. Allegedly, the cat figures out that the goal is getting through the course and not chasing the toy.
It couldn’t be my babies, though; they are too careful and jumpy to bum-rush through anything new. The comforter being moved on the bed requires a careful sniff and thorough examination the next time they jump up.
Another favorite method is “backchaining,” or training the course in reverse for the cats. The kitty begins with the last obstacle first and is clicker-trained through it. Also, it could not be my children; the sound of the clicker triggers one of my cats, and this creates a different type of back chain.
The final method is to introduce one obstacle at a time, moving on to the next until the cat is aware of them all. This allows the cat to navigate any course since it knows each individual section. This method lost me with voice and hand commands. Is this like baby sign language for cats?
Cat Agility Tournaments and Associations
There is a group called ICAT (International Cat Agility Tournaments) that hosts international cat agility events. They have not held an event since the one in Monza, Italy, in 2018. Hopefully, they will reconvene their tournaments soon.
The Cat Fanciers’ Association (CFA) also has international events that can be viewed on their calendar. These cat shows include cat agility.
And don’t forget, cats love doing an agility course within the comfort of their own homes for the purpose of exercise and mental stimulation. Don’t feel like you need to go to a Japanese or Italian cat show to do feline agility correctly.
Want to try cat agility? Let me know how it goes below.
