The raw materials

In the nature of things, not all kittens have the same abilities when it comes to learning. As with children, there are lively kittens who are eager to learn, and then again there are ones who are a bit slower on the uptake, or who are perhaps just less motivated to learn what we want them to. Not all kittens have the same interests and talents – some like carrying toys around and learn quickly to fetch, others prefer climbing and jumping and are not so keen on keeping still, and others yet again are passionate about food and will learn amazing tricks just for a tiny treat. But all cats are able to acquire the most important fundamental concepts for living with us!

Two factors are mixed in with the individual personality of a kitten – genetics, and the environment. The two influences cannot easily be marked off from one another, as the genetic basis often provides only the potential for future development. Only the right influences from the environment at the right time – for example, based on an encouraging education in the first weeks and months of life – enable the cat’s full potential to unfold.

One of the most important genetic factors is the breed. Cats have probably only been domesticated for around 9000 years in all – nothing like so long as dogs. And far and away most domestic cats today are still in the first phase of domestication, where animals live together with human beings and are used by them, but are not yet subjected to any kind of selective breeding through the choice and vetting of partners for procreation.

The first cat breeds came from the Middle East and the Far East, where the history of the cat’s domestication actually takes its origin. These ancient cat breeds include the Persian, the Siamese and the Burmese, the Abyssinian, the Egyptian Mau or Angora and the Turkish Van. But even for these, the intensive and selective choice of mates and deliberate development of the breed is only a few centuries old. Domestic cats remain free on the whole to choose their own partners, so that their gene pool still results in a colourful mixture of many different characteristics and survival skills, which do not always make cohabitation with the small predator that is the cat an easy matter.

This is because purebred cats are selected not just for optical features, such as fur colour and patterning, length of hair and physical build, but also more or less deliberately with a view to their friendliness to humans and social behaviour. Breeders are all the more eager to have offspring from a purebred cat when they are not just pretty and successful in cat shows, but are also open and friendly with people, good mothers and well socialised in living with other cats.

With some modern and exceptionally attractive cat breeds like the Bengal or the Savannah, however, interbreeding with wild species of small cats has again resulted in a sometimes explosive but certainly very demanding mixture of the domestic and the wild animal.

And although the genetic foundations are very important, they represent only one side of the equation. Even during the pregnancy countless forming environmental influences are already affecting the unborn kittens – like chronic stress on the part of the mother, for example, or dietary factors. The best genetic mix of a purebred cat will not give the animal a head start if it is exposed to unfavourable conditions and finds no soil in which it can flourish.

The second decisive factor for the cat’s personality, then, is the environment – particularly during the first few weeks of life, when the kitten has experiences which will have an abiding and fundamental influence for the rest of its life. Nature’s original idea was that a kitten who was scarcely formed in developmental terms, because blind and deaf, would be better able to adapt in a flexible way to its special environment by undergoing individual development subsequently. Well – this plan failed to take account of cases where kittens learn about life in the freedom of the farmyard and then move to a tiny city apartment on the fourth floor, where they come from an expansive Greek hotel garden to a terraced house estate, or from a female single household to the turbulence of a teaming patchwork family. Such fundamental changes in the living environment represent a major challenge even for the most adaptable kitten – sometimes an insuperable one…

These first few weeks of life in which the kittens are still living with their mother, siblings and perhaps even other adult cats in their original family are a very special, because sensitive phase. At this stage the kittens develop a reference system for their environment – they start to see, hear, taste and smell, and to move around the room.

From this moment on everything that they experience and perceive is at the same time learning for life – and the more they experience, the more they will learn. This is because the still immature brain develops in parallel to the sensory stimuli the kitten experiences, and so learns what in the environment is normal and what is dangerous. These initial impressions leave permanent and irrevocable traces which can no longer be modified in the course of the cat’s later life, or can only be changed with a great deal of effort.

In principle cats would be inclined to see human beings as dangerous – as a large predatory animal – and only the learning process of the first seven weeks of life brings it about that the cat classifies humans as a friend and life partner rather than an enemy. Everyday encounters with the human environment – different sounds, activities of people coming and going, children running around, loud music, vacuum cleaning or everyday things like cat litter leave an important and abiding impression on the kitten.

So in selecting a young cat it is exceptionally important that it should have had as many positive experiences with different human beings and environmental influences as possible, because it will hardly be possible to make up for the lack of them subsequently.

So in summing up we can say that the more varied and rich in content the environment the kitten experiences, the better conditions it provides for later learning and life in close proximity with human beings.

Thus a young cat can become flexible, quick to learn and intelligent not so much because it is a particularly active pedigree cat, but rather because it has been challenged and encouraged by the human environment in the best possible way as early as in the first few weeks of life.

Depending on the degree of encouragement your kitten has received and its individual genetic predisposition, you should take its individual level as a point of departure for educating it and encouraging its further development.

With a not particularly well socialised kitten, the first steps of training may involve getting the animal to trust you and allow you to pick it up without stress; when the kitten is exceptionally well socialised, it may learn a perfect Sit Pretty in the very first hour of your acquaintance, willing to wear a harness and go for walks on a leash.

From the point where you take the kitten home, however, the same principle applies to all kittens – don’t lose a single minute, get started with their education as quickly as possible!

The first learning process – socialisation

Strictly speaking, learning and training start for kittens from the moment when they come into the world. In these first few days of life the mother cat is the existentially crucial centre of their life – they suckle, are warmed and looked after. But it isn’t just on the physical level that kittens are cared for by their mothers, there are also important developments on the emotional level. Chemical messenger substances – the cat appeasing pheromone – bring about an intensive bonding as the foundation for further learning processes. A stable and secure bonding makes the kitten more resistant to stress and enables it to make an early start with exploring the wide new world, because it can return at any moment to the familiar feel of its mother’s tummy.

Cats are proverbially good mothers, and it is not surprising that the Egyptians reverenced them for that reason. But even for experienced and socially competent mother cats, bringing up and educating kittens is hard work – and how much more difficult does the job become when sources of food are scarce, the stress considerable and the dangers many and various!

As soon as the kittens start, at the age of three to four weeks, making their first attempts to crawl out of the nest into their immediate surroundings, the mother cat has her paws full – getting the kittens back into the nest, or carrying them back if they have gone too far; purring and chirping to keep up voice contact with them; and grooming them over and over again as a soothing activity.

Cats in the wild start the weaning process at this age already, by refusing to let their young suckle and bringing them prey they have caught instead. As a result of this increasing rejection kittens not only become familiar with solid food, but also and more importantly learn to deal with frustration. It’s true of cats as well – you can’t always have everything you want at once!

Well fed mother cats who do not have to hunt for themselves naturally restrict suckling at this age...