Conditioning

Recently our family got a new pet, it's a cat. Before when the cat was smaller he couldn't jump onto the kitchen table, and wasn't able to try to eat our food. Now that the cat has gotten big enough he starts jumping at any chance he gets to grab a bite of any food that is left out on the table or while someone is eating it. He doesn't care weather you see him do it or not.

I chose operant conditioning because I thought it would work the best for this experiment. Operant conditioning is: A process of behavior modification in which the likelihood of a specific behavior is increased or decreased through positive or negative reinforcement each time the behavior is exhibited, so that the subject comes to associate the pleasure or displeasure of the reinforcement with the behavior.

What I am going to do is fill a spray bottle with water. Every time that the cat grabs some food I will spray him with water in the face. I am hoping that after doing this several times the cat will associate eating our food with the unpleasant spray of water in his face and will stop eating our food all at once.

The experiment was a failure, although I sprayed the cat with water every single time I seen him trying to get our food he still keeps trying. He doesn't even try to be sneaky about it. After I sprayed him and put away my food almost every time the cat would hide behind a corner and jump out and grab onto my leg with his claws. Then I ran into a little problem. I couldn't find the spray bottle, after giving up the search I wanted to play with the cat I started looking for his toys. He usually hides them behind the couch. When I push out the couch to try to get his toys I see there lying on the ground with them, the spray bottle. The cat has out smarted me with in this one, he hid the spray bottle. If I were to do this experiment again I would use something that would affect the cat more than water, like pepper spray for example.

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