I know what you’re thinking cat owners: “My cat…come? When I want him/her to? Yeah…right.” No doubt we’ve all heard of cats that do come, and sit, and maybe even play dead. But you probably don’t have that kind of time, and your cat, with the attention span of a goldfish, only seems to care about food.

At the same time, the “come” comand can be a lifesaving technique. Say your inside-only cat gets out, or you find an open door and need to do a head count: how will you find them? Or you need to quickly remove your cat from a situation: how will you get kitty to follow?

It’s simple, really. And it employs your cat’s love of food.

First, find a treat or food that is readily accessible (i.e. no bits of raw turkey liver) and that your cat loves. Keep this in a location away from kitty. Next, determine what your ‘come’ call will sound like. We chose the classic smooching sound that people use to call cats. I chose this because if our cats were to get out, I would want them to come to people (who would, hopefully, read the tags that say “REWARD” and return our precious kitties) Your call can be anything from “Here, kitty, kitty” to “C’mon numpykins!”. Whatever it is, reserve it solely for calling your cats, and don’t use it without reinforcement. That is, treats.

When I first began training the cats, I would shake the bag of treats and make the smooching sound. They heard the bag and, naturally, came running. It’s that easy. Pretty soon I didn’t even have to shake the bag, just hold a few treats in my hand and they’d respond to the sound. We do this once a week or so, and the correlation between ‘coming to sound’ and ‘reward’ is now very strong in their minds.

And it makes me feel much better to know that I have a way to quickly reign in my felions.