Cat scratching success

Training a cat to claw where you want her or him to and nowhere else is quite a satisfying accomplishment. With many cats, it happens very quickly because, for whatever reason, they are able to understand that Natural Scratch is just for them and is the one place they can scratch with abandon and with the hearty approval of their human companions.

I don't think coming to this realization is a matter of intelligence. Two of our three current cats--Twinkles and Gemini--were immediate Natural Scratch clawers and haven't scratched anything else in years. The third, Leo, is probably smarter than the other two but he was harder to train.

It wasn't because he didn't understand what Natural Scratch was for or that he didn't like clawing it. What bugged him was being restricted to just one approved target. Leo wanted to scratch anywhere, anytime. To him, Natural Scratch was fine but so was the corner of the futon.

Nevertheless, through a combination of rewards for clawing Natural Scratch and negative conditioning--cat jail--for targeting anything else, we were able to train his bad scratching habits out of him. If you have a cat like Leo, Natural Scratch and its easy-to-use training method is just what the doctor ordered.