Easily frightened, a cat will retain very strong memories of any incident that it considers threatening. All it takes is one face-to-face encounter with a growling dog to convince a feline that the entire canine species is best avoided forever. However, positive experiences are just as easily stored and recalled, par ticularly if they have to do with food or play.

As any cat owner knows, domestic felines respond well to familiar sounds, such as can openers, the rattling of their dry-food bags or the crinkly noise of a favorite toy. Many of them also have an uncanny ability to know the hour of their regular breakfast time, waking up their owner if he or she tries to sleep in.

Training and Tricks

As the feline psyche has become better understood, animal handlers have had more success in training felines to perform in film and television, once the exclusive domain of the dog. Although they won't perform for pats on the head and "good-cat" praise from their owners, some felines, if properly motivated, can be trained to do a wide variety of tricks, from opening doors and jumping through hoops to turning on lights. In what psychologists call operant conditioning, a cat will repeat a behavior for a food reward. This is best achieved if the desired behavior is fun for the cat, even more so if the person doing the training is its usual food provider. More amenable to rewards of food than domestic felines, large wildcats such as lions and tigers have performed in circuses for centuries. Sadly, there were times when unspeakably cruel punishment was used interchangeably with rewards of fresh meat to "tame" these unpredictable and potentially dangerous wild felines into performing desired tricks.