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Thursday, May 02, 2019
How the cats in 'Pet Semetary' were trained for TV and movies
Business Insider: If you have a cat or have ever been around one, you know that they tend to have a mind of their own. But what do you do when you need them to behave in a certain way? Like in a movie, for instance.
Well, you train them.
2 comments:
Julian G.
said...
There was a window when I was actually thinking about trying to be an animal trainer for film and TV. I still really like animals, and I honestly could see myself liking that job. It makes sense that they had different cats for different parts of the role based on their personality. I’m glad they found rescue cats and that the cats are now very well cared for. As for the training methods describe here, it is about what I would expect. Clicker training and positive reinforcement is pretty standard. I haven’t tried to train a cat before, I did train a beta fish to do some tricks, but I honestly think cats would be harder to train because they are more mentally complex and are motivated by a lot of factors, not just food. Even with dogs, which are very trainable, you still can’t get every dog to do any job, it just depends on their personality.
When I “graduated” elementary school, I already knew I was gonna work in entertainment, but I was also well aware being an actress was never in my future. When asked what I will be in 2025 I said I would be a director of dog movies. It combined my two favorite things dogs and entertainment. Although I may not have known actually training animals for movies was an option. I have so much respect for animal trainers. I like the method used by these cat trainers. I have seen it pop up more ad move in movies and tv shows, using rescues as the animals. Although I wonder if these trainers not have more animals than they know what to do with. Do they sell the animals they are done with, adopt them through a screening process or just keep them all? I wonder which option would benefit the animal the most as they have been through many homes and places and any adjustment would be hard. But imagine getting a new family pet that is also a movie star, that would be 11 year old me’s dream come true.
2 comments:
There was a window when I was actually thinking about trying to be an animal trainer for film and TV. I still really like animals, and I honestly could see myself liking that job. It makes sense that they had different cats for different parts of the role based on their personality. I’m glad they found rescue cats and that the cats are now very well cared for. As for the training methods describe here, it is about what I would expect. Clicker training and positive reinforcement is pretty standard. I haven’t tried to train a cat before, I did train a beta fish to do some tricks, but I honestly think cats would be harder to train because they are more mentally complex and are motivated by a lot of factors, not just food. Even with dogs, which are very trainable, you still can’t get every dog to do any job, it just depends on their personality.
When I “graduated” elementary school, I already knew I was gonna work in entertainment, but I was also well aware being an actress was never in my future. When asked what I will be in 2025 I said I would be a director of dog movies. It combined my two favorite things dogs and entertainment. Although I may not have known actually training animals for movies was an option. I have so much respect for animal trainers. I like the method used by these cat trainers. I have seen it pop up more ad move in movies and tv shows, using rescues as the animals. Although I wonder if these trainers not have more animals than they know what to do with. Do they sell the animals they are done with, adopt them through a screening process or just keep them all? I wonder which option would benefit the animal the most as they have been through many homes and places and any adjustment would be hard. But imagine getting a new family pet that is also a movie star, that would be 11 year old me’s dream come true.
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