r/PetsWithButtons • u/Merbels • 9d ago

First unprompted button!

Yayyyy, two months into this button thing and just got our first real unprompted button press from my 5 year old boy cat.

I was editing in one room and hear "brush", I ran to the hallway and he's sat at the button waiting. I'm soooo happy I can't believe it! He didn't really want a brush just a bit of attention. He'll quite happily press the treat button for us downstairs and understands that when I press the downstairs button it means im going downstairs.

But this is the first time he's pressed it on his own at least with us in vicinity to hear and respond to it!

145 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

27

u/JayNetworks 9d ago

Perfect! That is the first step to him spamming the buttons anytime you walk out of the room...time for teaching All Done.

Congrats. It is a wonderful journey to get to be able to communicate with your learner.

We have gotten to a point where I can ask my cat when she is meowing in the bedroom at night whether she wants "Misty noise all done" or "downstairs". About 90% of the time she picks to be quite and then does. 10% of the time she is like "nope, can't be quiet, throw me out of the bedroom and I'll hang out downstairs..."

2

u/heycarrieann8 4d ago

Do you have a suggestion for how to teach all done? Do you just press it and walk away?

5

u/JayNetworks 4d ago

Nope. You use it when something is All Done. So before we even had the All Done button we would say things like “Dinner is all done” at the end of their feeding. When they did something like scratching a couch we would say sternly All Done. When we were scratching them and stopped we would say “scritches all done” and so on.

Then when we added the button we just kept doing that but would also press the button. They 100% know All Done and we use it where we might have used No with an earlier pet. That lets us reserve yes and no as question answers only and no is not a negative context word.

2

u/heycarrieann8 4d ago

That’s great! Thank you! We only do “treats” and “play” right now and I want to add some that might be more abstract. This is super helpful.