Q: My cat can’t wait for us in the mornings to get up. Although her food, water and litterbox are in our room, she wants out. We keep the bedroom door closed so she won’t bother the children (she wants to play with them), or our dogs, who sleep in the kitchen. How can we teach her to wait?
A: It sounds as if your cat has you well trained! What has happened seems to be that, when she started wanting to go out before you were ready to let her out, she harassed you to the point where it seemed the only way to get any peace was to let her out. Hey, presto! She has learned that this is what she has to do to get you to get up and let her out!
Every time you get up and let her out, you are reinforcing this behaviour, so she will carry on doing it.
What you need to do, and I need to warn you upfront this is not going to be easy, is to completely ignore her when she starts to harass you. By completely ignore I mean no talking to her, no pushing her away, no shouting – so absolutely nothing – like you are not even aware of her.
She is obviously going to get frustrated, because what she has so successfully been doing for some time now is suddenly not working. She is very likely to renew her efforts and escalate the behaviour in an effort to get you to respond.
Sadly, a lot of people give up at this stage because it seems like what you are doing is not working. It is working, but she has to figure out that what used to work before is no longer working for her.
If you give up halfway through, all you have taught her is that she needs to try that much harder/bite a bit harder/meow that much louder for you to get up to let her out.
It normally takes between three and seven days before she learns that the old behaviour is not working and she stops trying to get you out of bed so early.
Another good idea is to have a play session with your cat before bed. This will prevent her from going to sleep too early in the evening, and will tire her out a bit so she might sleep a little longer in the morning.
Also try feeding her a bit later in the evening.
Wendy Wilson, behaviourist