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You've been raised by crazy people. >.> Feline psychology doesn't work like that. Cats don't do a very good job of associating cause and effect across time. The cause and effect have to happen at very close to the same time for them to learn from it -- if they bite something and it burns their tongue, they'll learn from that; if they try to pounce a porcupine and get a face full of quills, they'll learn from that.

But if they pee on the rug and you swat them, they don't see a relationship between cause and effect. They just learn to associate angry humans with getting swatted... but they don't pick up that the human is angry because they peed on the rug, ESPECIALLY if you don't catch them in the act. At best, they learn to pee on the rug when you're not watching. Rubbing their face in it doesn't help either; they get cause and effect backwards ("angry human means I get my nose shoved in pee", not "pee means angry human").

What DOES work is interrupting the undesirable action. Cats learn from the environment. If you squirt them with water (NOT swat them, that just doesn't work at all for cats, because "big scary human" overrides whatever other cause they might be thinking about) when they start to pee on the rug, then they associate the unpleasantness of getting wet with urination outside the litterbox. If you make a loud noise and make them jump when they start to claw on something, they associate clawing on things with scary noises. If you put hot pepper sauce on things they chew on, the next time they take a bite they learn that it burns.