Training & Behavior

I whistled at the kettle, not at the cat, a two-note thing I do without thinking when I'm waiting for water. The cat, Nell, who ignores her name, the bell, the treat jar rattle, and every reasonable request, came at a run. I stood there with the kettle, baffled, and she wound between my legs like I'd summoned her on purpose.

Cats are supposed to be the ones who don't come. Everyone says it, the dog comes, the cat considers, and I'd believed it because Nell had spent a year proving it. Her name meant nothing. A shake of biscuits meant a slow stroll, if she felt like it. But a whistle, an absent-minded whistle at a kettle, and she was there before the steam.

I tested it, because I'm like that. Whistled the same two notes in the next room, no kettle, no food, nothing. She appeared. Whistled again from the garden, where she'd been ignoring me for ten minutes. She came through the cat flap like I'd blown the starting gun. The recall I'd failed to build with her name, I'd accidentally built with a tune I wasn't even directing at her.

So I made it a thing. Same whistle, every time I wanted her, and a treat the first weeks so the tune meant good, not just me. Within a month she'd come to the whistle from anywhere in the house, the garden, the roof of the shed she shouldn't have been on. Her name was still decorative. The whistle was the real word, and we both knew which one counted.

Why it worked I'll never fully know. Maybe the pitch cut through cat indifference in a way speech doesn't. Maybe the consistency, the exact same notes every time, gave her something her name, said in a hundred tones, never did. A recall needs to be one sound, one meaning, repeated, and a whistle is easier to repeat identically than a word said by a person who inflects everything.

I'm not claiming I trained her. I tripped over the method and then did the boring part of repeating it until it stuck, which is most of training anyway, the finding and the repeating. The cat didn't change. I just finally spoke a language she'd been willing to hear.

If your cat won't come, try a sound that isn't your voice, a whistle, a click, a specific word you never use for anything else, and use it like a bell that always means the same thing. Nell still ignores me when I call her name, and still appears when I whistle, and I've made my peace with being the kettle-whistler who summoned a cat by accident. The accident was the lesson. The repeating was the work.

My partner found it unnerving, me whistling at the cat like a shepherd, and refused to learn the tune, so Nell comes to me and ignores them, which has become a small domestic rivalry about who the cat loves, and the answer is the whistle, not either of us, which neither of us loves admitting.

I tried changing the tune once, a different two notes, to see if it was the sound or the consistency, and she ignored the new one, which proved it wasn't magic, it was the specific sound repeated, and I went back to the kettle tune, the only one she'd agreed to. A recall needs to be one sound, one meaning, repeated, and a whistle is easier to repeat than a name said in a hundred tones.

The name still does nothing. I've made peace with that. The whistle is the real word between us, and I use it like a bell that always means the same thing, treat or no treat now, because the habit outgrew the bribe. She comes because the sound is the sound, not because of what follows, and that's the whole of a recall.

If your cat won't come, try a sound that isn't your voice, a whistle, a click, a word you never use for anything else, and use it like a bell that always means the same thing. Nell still ignores her name and appears at the whistle, and I've made peace with being the kettle-whistler who summoned a cat by accident. The accident was the lesson. The repeating was the work.

I'm not claiming I trained her. I tripped over the method and then did the boring part of repeating it until it stuck, which is most of training anyway, the finding and the repeating. The cat didn't change. I just finally spoke a language she'd been willing to hear, and the whistle happened to be the first word in it.

The whistle lives in my pocket now, a small thing on a keyring, because you never know when you'll need the one word she hears. Nell ignores the world and answers the tune, and that's the whole deal between a cat and the person who accidentally trained her. I whistle, she comes, the kettle boils, and the house runs the way it learned to.