Meet Nipa, The Brilliant Finnish Cat Who Knows More Tricks Than Most Dogs.

Cats have a bit of a bad reputation when it comes to compliance. In other words, they usually do exactly what they want precisely when they want to do it!

Their natural independence makes it difficult to train them, or at least, that’s what we always used to believe. But Nipa, a Toyger cat from Finland, is changing the way we think about felines learning new tricks forever.

Nipa’s human Tiina works in a nursing home, and her residents love visiting with friendly therapy animals. Tiina decided to take Nipa to work with her to bring everyone more joy and comfort, but in order for that to happen, Nipa had to learn some manners first.

“I saw @cat.school‘s videos on how Julie, the cat school teacher, has taught her cat tricks, and I got inspired so I signed up for cat school and learned the basics in clicker training,” Tiina said.

After weeks of daily practice sessions, Nipa recently graduated from kitty school!

Now, Nipa and Tiina start each and every day with a 5-15 minute training session.

Using treats and a plastic clicker, Tiina has taught Nipa more than 50 tricks, including his favorite, “cop cop,” where he walks up the stairs on top of his mom’s feet.

Tiina said training Nipa to do these tricks was relatively simple once she knew how to do it.

“It depends a lot on the trick and how actively we train it,” she explained. “Some tricks are harder to teach than others. The most challenging trick was probably skateboarding, I think he could still improve his skateboarding talent.”

Now that he’s all trained up, Nipa can go to work with Tiina, and the residents have loved having him around. One of them actually cried tears of joy while Nipa was sitting in his lap.

“Nipa is like an ‘ice breaker,'” Tiina said. “The seniors immediately light up when they see him and start talking to him and me. Even seniors that don’t want to join in other activities or talk to me individually welcome me when I have Nipa with me at work. Nipa brings a lot of joy to seniors and to see them happy makes me happy.”

There’s a reason Tiina calls Nipa “the talented cat.” He’s clearly a quick study who loves to learn (and eat treats)! We wonder if it’s too late to teach our old cat new tricks?

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