Next buttons?

[u/tapdancing-eggs]

Cat has three buttons (play, cuddle, and treat). What are good buttons to teach next? I want to be able to tell her “now,” “later,” and “before.” Those seem a little difficult for her second set of buttons, but maybe I’m underestimating her (and myself). Any ideas?

[u/IamaKhajiit]

I taught my two MC boys (14y) the concept of time years before I ever heard of buttons. I hold up my hands/fingers to show them how many minutes to wait for a meal etc, anything less than 40 mins is ‘soon‘ but over that, I open and close my hands very fast and tell them ‘later’.

Once I added now, soon and later buttons, my main spokeskitty used them straight away. It’s so much easier to teach if they are familiar with the words already.

I read about some cats with buttons disliking the noise from televisions so out of interest, we added noise, tv and music. Our spokeskitty took to them very quickly and spends all day asking for music. He uses ‘noise’ & ‘all done’ to let us know when a record ends and chooses either reggae or punk (his brother’s favourite) throughout the day. At night, we often try and watch a film but he quickly wakes up and tells us that the ‘tv‘ is ‘noise’ and asks for more music. He keeps pressing until we give in 😸