Good morning, humans and non-humans!
There isn’t a better moment than your cat cuddles up on you and shows affection.
However, some of our cats are just not lap cats, they prefer to sit next to you rather
than sitting on top of you.
While not all cats can be trained into lap cats, there are 6 steps we can use to encourage
it.
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Let’s get it.
Here are the things you need.
First, you need to have a good relationship with your cat.
Not all cats are good candidates for training to sit in lap.
If they are scared of you, or won’t even get close to you, let’s work on your relationship
first before worrying about them not sitting in your lap.
You also need a blanket.
Cats like to hang out at a warm and soft spot, prepare a blanket they will like, it will
be even better if it has your scent on it.
Lastly, we need some treats to reinforce the behavior of them sitting on your lap.
If your cat usually sits next to you or somewhere near you, this is a great starting point.
The first step here is actually to get them used to cuddling, without them sitting on
your lap.
Find a place where there is enough space and where you and your kitty usually hang out.
This can be in your couch, playroom, in our case, it’s in our bed.
Place the blanket on top you, with some extra space around you.
When your kitty comes over, let them cuddle with you on top of the blanket next to you.
Pet them and just hang out there for a little bit.
While your cat is calm and relaxed sitting next to you on the blanket, you want to gently
pick them up and move them just a little bit and place them on your lap or on top of you,
still on top of the blanket.
Let them adjust to a position they are comfortable.
You want to watch how they react to the movement.
If they are okay with being placed on your lap, that’s great, keep petting them or
verbally reward them to reinforce this behavior.
After they are okay with being placed on top of you on the blanket, let’s now move this
act to the living room where I want him to sit on my lap.
We also need to find a good time, when they are in play or fight mode, they don’t want
to be petted nor get too close to you.
I found Manju calm and relaxed after about 20-30 minutes of playing and a big meal.
Not all cats do this, but you want to pick a good time where your cat seems relaxed.
Here we are in the living room where I want Manju to sit on my lap.
Again, let’s start with the blanket, even without the cat sitting on top of us.
We sit or lay down in a comfortable position and stay calm, let the cat come to us.
We repeat what we did earlier, cuddling with our cat.
Very similar to what we did earlier, we want to place our cat on top of us because we are
in a new room, just in case our cat doesn't feel 100% confident about it, or petting and
verbal rewarding them isn’t enough, we want to introduce them to a new reward system,
by giving them treats.
So we place them on top of us for about 10-20 seconds, give them some treats, to build a
positive association that “oh sitting on top of her means good stuff will happen”,
it’s more likely for them to adapt to the behavior.
We want to repeat this, and after a while, we have conditioned them and they see us calm
and sitting or laying down on the couch, they want to come over and see if anything good
happens.
After we introduce them to sitting on top of us, now it’s more about repeating and
slowly reducing the frequency of giving them treats.
If at some point they are comfortable sitting on your lap, you can also remove the blanket
and see how they behave.
Here are several tips trying out these steps.
First, again, not all cats are lap cats.
Age, energy level, personality, and environment all of these play a role here.
So if they don’t end up sitting on your lap, don’t get too frustrated, rather accept
them for who they are.
Also, when they are on top of our lap, don’t restrain or force them to stay, let them escape
if they want to.
Not being able to move freely is only taking points away in training them to sit on our
lap.
Let them know this is a safe space and they can come and go as they wish.
The final tip here is to watch out for their body language, especially tail movement while
we pet them.
We want to make them comfortable but not overly stimulated.
If they swing their tail back and forth with big movements, we want to stop stroking their
hair otherwise they will run away or we end up getting bit.
This is how we encourage a cat to sit on our lap.
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pet owners like you.
We also have other cat guides on our channel, please check them out if you are interested.
We are Furry Diary, and see you in our next video.
Bye!