lol she's adorable!!!!
I love to hear about somebody adopting a rescue kitty!
As I said before, clicker training is a very universal method. It's called operant conditioning. What happens, is that you condition the animal so that the click means they did something correct. It works better than praise or food alone for 2 main reasons...one is because it's more accurate. You can click faster than you can say "good kitty!". It makes capturing the behavior easier and it makes it alot easier and less frusterating for the animal because they'll know or learn very quickly what you want. You click the things you like and they do it again. You don't click a behavior, they'll stop doing it because it doesn't get a reward. Second reason is it helps the animal to focus. Some animals are so food motivated that when you bust out the food, thats all their focused on and they don't pay attention to you. With clicker training, they're working for the click which in turn, gets them the treat. They become focused on getting the click instead of gobbling down food.
The first step to clicker training is getting a clicker and finding what motivates your pet. With dogs you can use a toy, praise or food or a combination. With cats though, food is the most probable motivator along with praise and pets. Next comes conditioning. It's simple enough, click then treat. Click then treat. Over and over again for 5 minutes a few times a day for a few days.
How do you know when the cat is conditioned? Watch her response when you click the clicker. I bet you've already conditioned your cat but using a different sound...the sound of a can of cat food opening. It worked the same way. With repitition, she learned that the sound of the can opening means food. With any cat, you can open the can in the kitchen and she'll run in from where ever she was because she knows she's going to get the food. Same thing will happen with the clicker. Click it randomly when she's awake and she should perk up and come to you.
Then comes the training. Start training as usual and when you accomplish a behavior, click then treat. For example, when teaching sit...use a treat as a lure. Bring it up past her head and start going over her head and she'll follow it right into a sitting position. Say sit as she's sitting then the moment her bum hits the ground, click and give her the treat.
You can also "capture" behaviors. I once taught a dog to scratch himself on command. Just click whenever the animal does the behavior you want. Because the behavior got a positive consequence, the click, it's likely to do it again. See it again? Click it and treat. Pretty soon you'll be able to add a cue and the behavior will be learned.
There aren't any books out there for clicker training cats, but because it's the same psychology, you can still get the basic info from a dog clicker training book. Click for Joy is a good one. As is Getting Started: Clicker training for birds. The latter is the one I recommend getting as it does a very good job of explaining it.
Feel free to ask questions if something doesn't make sense or you want me to go more in dept on something
