From my own experience, also from what I’ve read about it, animals don’t understand punishment, they can’t make that connection. The two events would seem unrelated. For instance if your dog tends to run away on a walk and you then shout at it in an angry way when it comes back, it can’t make that connection to deduce that you are angry with it for going so far away. Instead it will think (rather bewildered) that you are angry with it for coming back. So will stay away longer next time probably.

They just have a more immediate way of looking at things. Very short deduction spans. Long memories, it’s not like they are stupid really, fast reactions, good senses, very aware of the world, but just don’t see it in this complicated way that we do where you chain things together which are separated even by a few minutes and think one could be a punishment for the other.

In the case of the dog that runs away, then even though you want to get angry with it for staying away for so long, it is just too late for that. You’d have to get its attention somehow and communicate that you are angry with it somehow when it was a long way away, which is hard to do.

So, you have to just encourage it and say “good dog”, give it a treat etc, because what it just did, come back to you, is what you want to encourage. The running away is ancient history for it, in a way. I suppose that’s a way to think about it. It’s like, if you did something last week, and then this week long after it was over, someone got very angry with you, then unless they told you (and you can’t tell a dog) you’d never make that connection. For the dog, it’s like running away happened last week, it remembers doing it (I expect so anyway, after all they dream like we do and do have good memories) but doesn’t see the connection.

It was too late, there was nothing really you could do any more to communicate to the cat that the chicken was out of bounds for it, not once it was over and done.