And then do nothing, which is the hardest thing of all to do. Nothing means nothing. Do not look at a yowling cat. Do not talk to your yowling cat. Do not grunt and groan and mumble obscenities to yourself. Do not toss cat toys across the room to distract him, or to give him something to. Do not invite him into your bed. Do not shoo him from the room not at this point, anyway — there is nothing wrong with excluding him from your room before the yowling begins and slam the door.
All of these things, even the negative or unpleasant things, give a cat attention for yowling. The more you reinforce your cat for yowling at night, the more your cat is going to yowl. Intermittent rewards are particularly damaging because they may ingrain a behavior even more firmly than actually tossing your cat a favorite treat every time he yowls.
Doing nothing can be particularly difficult because of an animal behavioral concept called extinction burst , which is a kind of doubling down on a behavior. Cosmos Magazine , cosmosmagazine. Psychology Today , psychologytoday. Margaret — Wow! Thanks for sharing! My 16 year old cat has been howling at night for months. This has stopped since we discovered and remedied mice and bats in the attic. He eventually got so upset that in the middle of the night he began to focus on certain areas where he would yowl and hiss.
This behavior was obvious to us. However at the beginning he would just sit in the middle of a room and yowl. He and the other cat have earned our respect for their efforts to warn us of the intruders. Yes, eventually we heard them too. But we now know we can depend on their exceptional senses to warn us.
So if everything else checks out with the vet, look for intruders. Hi Becky! Congrats to your friend on the new cat, and to you for doing the important work of fostering. But there is only one way through this problem.
Doing anything that is not nothing at 3 AM will only reinforce the yowling behavior. Never punish your cat for yowling. This will only serve to instill fear in her, which can make matters worse. Instead, use positive reinforcement to train the behavior out of her.
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