Hear me.

I can't hear you hold on a second audio that's.

Hello there, cat people.

Dan, the cat Man here along with Steven Quant from catbehaviorhelp.com, our resident cat behavior expert from catbehaviorhelp.com and our producer.

Hi, Steven.

Hey Dan, it is great to be here as always.

Nice to see you.

Great to be back in the saddle.

So a few housekeeping things very quickly.

This is kind of a between seasons series that Steven and I have planned of cat treat little short episodes where we focus on on cat behavior topics that we think will be helpful for people with their cats.

So right now we're between season 3 and four and Michelle, our beloved Co host is right now in treatment for our breast cancer.

So while she is dealing with that and focusing on that, Steven and I are keeping busy by doing little cat treat episodes.

And one more housekeeping thing is Sam, Samantha Knox, our opinion columnist, has decided to focus on her cat rescue.

So she will no longer be with our podcast moving forward.

Said, hey, cats always come first.

Cat rescue, finding cats homes, always she'd come before a podcast.

So we thank her for everything she did for us and we wish her well on the show.

And Steven, you just had a, a national cat conference, didn't you?

Did you not?

Didn't you?

I was this past Saturday.

I was a speaker at the Ultimate Cat Conference 2025 and it was really, really exciting and great opportunity.

Wonderful, we'll have a link to that in the description about information on that conference.

I love it.

I love that you're able to to appear at these conferences, you know, represent you represent capyourhelp.com and you know, maybe represent us a little bit too.

So wonderful.

I'm so glad you get those opportunities.

And last thing before we get to our cat treat is the Shelter Cats podcast is part of the Chewy Rescue and affiliate program.

So please click the link in the podcast description.

But Chewy does amazing things for local cat rescue.

So if you click the link in the description and do your Chewy purchase that way, you'll not only help Chewy in their mission to support local rescues, you also will support the podcast.

That's Michelle's commercial.

So I have to do that until she's feeling better.

I hope it was good enough.

So for our cat treat tonight, for our episode 67 cat treat, Steven, I know you, We were gonna discuss a really great program for helping very scared cats.

And this is a particular interest to me because my Rosie is a very scared, jittery cat and that's one of my biggest struggles with her.

She's very sweet, but she is very scared, very jittery.

So I'm particularly interested in this program.

Can you tell us more about it?

Yeah.

So to be fair, Dan, this is a program.

We use it at the shelter at ACC in New York City.

It can also be used in people's homes.

But it is designed for really scared cats, not just it is for a specific situation where a cat is so scared that they're basically hissing and growling or swatting or spitting when you approach them.

And no amount of positive reinforcement seems to help.

In other words, offering treats may be gentle play your kind contact does not does not work.

And some people adopt cats that are in this condition.

It's not common for people to live with cats who are this scared all the time.

And, and hopefully they, you know, they make adjustments once they are home.

But for people who adopt cats like this, this program can speed the process by which a cat acclimates to human contact.

And I'll give you a quick description of how it goes.

We, by the way, we also track cats on this program.

We call it the Freddy Cat Club at ACC.

And we track cats how long they're on it when they graduate and improve.

And we even have before and after videos that we we record to kind of demonstrate what's going on.

But so here's the thing.

If a cat is so scared that it can't accept positive reinforcement, in other words, treats as an example to come forward and allow some contact, we do a different type of behavior program.

I'm not going to call it what it's technically called yet because it's people hear it and they get they wonder what's really going on.

But I'll describe it.

So if a cat hisses at you, what are you?

What are you likely to do?

Probably back off at 1st and then and then give them space.

Yeah.

So if you do that, you've taught the cat that hissing works, that that's that's exactly what they should do.

I positively reinforce the hissing, I guess, right?

Well, they that's a great question.

They've gotten you to to basically react to to them, you and you in a sense reinforcing what they're doing.

Yes, it's true.

So another way of working with a cat is to teach them to calm down.

So I'll give you the the basic story.

When we had the first cat on this program, a cat named Lucky, this is at the shelter.

And Lucky was hissing, growling, spitting and lunging at us.

And she did this every day for a month with no improvement, no matter what we tried to offer in terms of positive reinforcement.

And I then worked with her with this new program, which I discovered thanks to a great person named Beth Edelman who talked about this program.

And there's a YouTube video on it that we could even link to it.

How about we do that?

Let's link.

It will link it in the description by all means.

Thank you.

Link to her presentation.

We started doing this work and I did basically one to two minutes five times a day with this kitten and at the end of the five days the kitten was eating squeeze up treats off a tongue depressor 6 inches from my hand.

Wow.

Yeah, dramatic.

And we know that kitten wasn't getting better because we were watching this kitten over the course of a month.

So this is how it works.

If you have a cat at home, who you maybe you brought this cat home and he's super, super scared and he's acting this way where he's really tense and demonstrating that.

And you gently go up to him or her and you present yourself in a non threatening way as best you can, right slow blink, not lots of hard staring right at their eyes, right gentle voice.

You wait for them to stop hissing.

They will get tired of it.

They'll take a breath, right?

They will pause in their hissing.

And the moment you do that, you do what's called marking the behavior.

You say good Kitty, and then you give them exactly what they want, which is for you to leap, to walk away.

And that's what you do.

You walk away, but you've walked away when they acted calmly towards you, they were not hissing or growling.

They'd taken a moment to regroup.

And every time you meet with them, you have this encounter and they hiss.

You wait, they take a breath, they relax a little bit, you mark it and you leave.

And what you're teaching the cat is that when they relax, you leave, you get out of the picture and this before too long.

Sometimes this happens very quickly.

They continue to relax to the point where they can now accept positive reinforcement.

And the name, the official name of this program because there's a behavior, it's called the quadrant.

People in animal welfare know what this is.

Dog trainers know what this is.

There's something called positive reinforcement, positive punishment, negative reinforcement and negative punishment.

And some people think that the only thing that's acceptable is positive reinforcement, but it's not actually true.

It's it depends on how you design these encounters.

Positive does not mean good.

Positive means the addition of a stimulus.

So in the context of positive reinforcement, we're adding a stimulus like a treat to get a behavior to repeat or replicate.

So that's the reinforcement part.

You know, I don't need to talk about the punishment sides of it.

But just to briefly clarify, it's not about hurting or scaring an animal.

Punishment is a psycho, is a psychological term for getting a behavior to stop.

So if we can do something that is very gentle and we do a thing, in other words, we're acting upon the animal in a way that's gentle and we get them to stop doing something that's a positive punishment.

So as an example, a little bit of pressure on a leash, getting to get a dog to stop trying to move forward it it, it would be a positive punishment.

So we know what positive reinforcement is.

Negative reinforcement.

Negative doesn't mean bad.

Negative means the removal of a stimulus.

So when the cat's hissing at me and I wait and she calms down, she pauses, you know, she stops hissing and I mark it and then I leave.

My leaving is the negative component.

And by getting her to repeat calming down, I'm reinforcing that through doing removing a stimulus.

And then what happens is we get the cat to the point where they can now accept the positive reinforcement.

They can start accepting treats like Lucky did in exchange for giving a behavior and getting a reward.

It can, it can work.

The fastest we've had at work on cats who were absolutely terrified beyond measure was 2 days.

And we've had some who've taken a couple weeks or a little bit longer than that, but the results are still dramatic.

We've had well over 100 cats on this program.

The success rate is, is tremendous.

And within a shelter context, I'm, you know, I'm, you know, I talked about it at the conference because there are a lot of shelters that don't know about this type of work.

What it can do is reduce euthanasia in shelters that are euthanizing for space.

It reduces the resources that need to be used for an animal because the amount of time that they're in the shelter has been reduced because they can.

Now lucky was adopted through our New Hope program a day after we had that success with her.

You know, we took a video and she was out of there.

So it reduces resources, reduces the possibility, the likelihood of workers getting injured by being bitten or scratched, right.

So there's lots of great reasons to do it, but you know, you have to be very careful using the words negative reinforcement because when we well, I won't say exactly what happened, but we had to have a discussion with leadership after we used the words negative reinforcement to educate them a bit on what it all meant.

And so make it, you know, if you're going to institute is in a shelter environment, you should make up a name, you know, fearful, the friendly fraidy cat club, something cute.

And you never have to tell leadership what the actual process is called because that was invented by, you know, old guys a long time ago in a psychological sort of context.

And just then just do the work.

And we also have a handout.

It's a multi page guide on how to implement this program.

And in theory, I would be happy to send it to any organization or person who wants it.

You know, if if you're listening to this and you want a written copy of our Freddy Cat Club guide, I'm sure there's contact methods associated with the podcast.

Right, yeah, we'll have e-mail address.

We have e-mail addresses in the podcast description.

So send us an e-mail or, you know, leave a comment.

If you're on YouTube or Spotify, leave a comment with your contact info, you know, an e-mail address and we'd be happy to send it to you.

Great.

I want to, I want to make sure I get this right.

So cat is hissing.

Don't back away.

Let the cat finish hissing and say good Kitty.

Yep, and then back away.

And try to stay calm while they're hissing like you know your back I guess.

Yeah, yeah, don't get hard.

Stare at them, you know, slow blink, talk gently.

Look, you know, slightly off to the side from from their eyes.

Don't be threatening, in other words.

And yeah, that's that's basically.

What's it's What an awesome way to help make unadoptable cats adoptable.

And even with feral cats, cats that are not socialized to humans and, and may never be, it still improves their quality of life while they're with us in the shelter.

And so there are just a million reasons to do this.

One more, one more quick question that dropped in my head.

For those people that adopt one of these, presumably before they begin this program, you said people adopt.

A very.

Scared cat.

Someone anywhere in the country might adopt A cat who's incredibly scared.

What if they hissed and immediately run under the bed?

How does that affect the ability to say good Kitty?

If they don't wait to finish?

If they hiss at you and zoom under something.

So this can't comes up in Beth Edelman's presentation.

There used to be this feeling that with under socialized cats or very fearful cats, you should put them in a crate so they can't do exactly what you just described.

And we no longer believe, we do not believe in creating scared cats because all we can do is approach them.

They have nowhere to go, they're not living normal lives, they don't get to express normal behaviors.

They're stuck in a crate.

It's better to let them out into a room and if they're going to hide under the sofa, then they're going to hide under the sofa.

And you can go up to them and look under the sofa and see the cat and the cat hisses at you from under the sofa and then you do the same process.

Exactly.

Under something you could still do the same.

Yeah, you could do the same.

OK, put your head under, let them hiss at you, let them finish market and leave.

Beth did with the cat that she was given to foster, a cat who did not get better after several months in a crate.

And she just let it be in her Home Office and she would go and do this process with the cat multiple times a day.

And in about 10 days, the cat was purring on her lap.

Awesome.

I'm so glad that you explained this to us on the podcast.

We hope people, people that either adopt or have rescues that are struggling with these types of cats.

I hope they can, I hope they can adopt Spartan upon these programs for their own organizations.

We'll have all the information in the description.

If you were looking for the printed material, just shoot us an e-mail and and we'll get that out to you.

That's awesome.

Thank you, Steven.

Thank you, Steven.

For this, my pleasure.

Great to be here with you, Dan.

So we will see you in the next Cat Treat episode.

Bye for now.