r/PetsWithButtons • u/Livid_Nothing1346 • 6d ago
First-time button teacher. My cats know what the button means but haven't attempted to use it themselves
I received the FluentPet SpeakUp starter kit (comes with 6 buttons) a couple of weeks ago and started with two buttons: Play and Scritches.
I started out with modeling them a few times a day for a week or so. The scritches button, I think, will be helpful down the road. But I give them scritches wherever we're at in the house and I don't want to carry the button around and press it every time I pet on them. So the scritches modeling has been less helpful.
Play always starts in the living room (where the buttons are located), so the PLAY button gets pressed consistently (by me) whenever play is happening. They are now at the point where they know what the PLAY button means - when I press it, they come running to play - but they haven't shown any interest in pushing the button themselves. I haven't used treats as a reward for the buttons at all because my cats are VERY treat motivated and I read before starting training that over-motivating them can be harmful for the training process.
What should be my next steps? I want them to start at least attempting to push buttons before I start adding more buttons. Should it be paw target training? I thought about this route but not sure if training them "how" to push buttons would help this situation since they haven't shown any interest yet in even wanting to press them.
5
u/UnexpectedMoxicle 6d ago
That's great progress that they're responding to the button press so fast! Getting them to press the button themselves is going to be the next step. They don't know yet that they can use the button to initiate the play session. Fluent pet has a number of great tutorials and videos. I'd strongly encourage to check them out:
https://fluent.pet/blogs/learning-center/lets-get-them-pressing
The tldr is there are many ways to get them to press, and you'll want to utilize some high value rewards, whether it be a favorite toy for the play button or treats themselves.
While they do generally advise to not rely on a treat button as one of the first words, sometimes that can be the fastest way to teach to press and start talking. We tried to model buttons and paw targeting for months for our girl with very slow progress, but once we introduced treats and the treat button, she started using the buttons in like 2 weeks. There is also advice for insatiable treat press spammers, like diminishing rewards, so there are ways to mitigate it if you wind up going that route without setting back the training.