To Click or Not to Click?

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We are often asked the question:

“I am wondering if your classes will require me to use a clicker. I guess I am too uncoordinated to manage the clicker, treats, and leash all at once.  Is clicker use optional at your school?”

… and the answer is a resounding “Yes, clicker use is optional.”

We do use clickers in our classes and try our best to help our students get over their concerns about coordination. Let me tell you, if I can conquer a clicker (arthritic fingers, inconsistent timing, etc.), anyone can! However, it’s difficult enough to be handling a 5-month-old puppy and listening to the instructor and learn, without struggling with a clicker. So we are flexible. And patient.
The clicker is merely a tool that helps us teach the dog things that we can teach without it. In my experience, the clicker speeds up the dog’s learning because of its uniqueness (a sound never heard except in the context of learning (with treats to follow), but you can teach your dog good behavior with the use of a special word instead of the clicker. Your instructor will help you with this.

Here’s an article on clicker basics.

Conditioning Your Dog with Fun Tricks

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Getting and keeping your performance dog in good condition pays huge benefits. He will perform better and longer, and the possibility of injury is greatly reduced. You can do these tricks at home — actually pretty much anywhere — and no special equipment is required. And since you will be teaching these tricks in a positive manner, your partnership with your dog will grow. Besides, teaching these tricks is FUN!

Rear End Awareness Exercises

Rear-end awareness is critical for performance dog success. They really do need to learn where their hind end is and to move their rear legs consciously.
This video shows 22 rear-end awareness exercises for dogs.

Give Paw, High-Five, Wave

Kickback Stand

Short video with step-by-step instruction on how to teach your dog to do a kickback stand from a sit position (as opposed to walking forward with the front feet).

Target with Hind Foot

Bonus: Teach dog to self-trim rear nails:

Back Up


and

Roll Over


Take a Bow

Part 1

and Part 2

Crawl

Forward

and backwards

Sidestep

From Pam’s Dog Academy. Five-minute video on teaching dog to sidestep:

This video is for clicker-training junkies like me (and hopefully you). Twenty minutes long, detailed, showing how to train the sidestep from scratch using pure shaping, including pitfalls and so many minute details that could be required to get the job done right. Love the cue: Frrrrrront.”

Another video from Pam’s Dog Academy, training sidestep (using stairs):

 

 

Shaping a Behavior

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Can your dog read your mind?

Of course he can! You’ll probably swear to it after you’ve shaped a few behaviors, and you can tell your friends this is the case. But you’ll know the truth – that he’s offering you behaviors because he’s been reinforced repeatedly for those behaviors – and he even figured out what works (i.e., what you want. There you go, he can read your mind!).

I like to “shape behaviors” because this method is 100% hands-off and the dog gets to decide what to do – or so he thinks. This method empowers dogs to use their brains – and they do have brains – to figure out how to earn the reinforcement. It’s the most rewarding method I’ve used to train dogs, and I’m talking about rewarding to me, as well as to the dog!

To teach a dog a new behavior, a good trainer will divide the behavior into small “slices” – pieces of behavior that when put together form the final action we want the dog to perform.

For example, to sit in front of you, your dog must first lift his head up, shift weight back, slide his rear legs forward while dropping his haunches… In shaping a sit, each of those pieces would be clicked and treated multiple times. The more pieces a desired behavior is sliced into and each of those pieces reinforced, the more solidly the dog learns the final desired behavior.

Playing the following game with your dog will give you an idea of how the act of reinforcing small behaviors will lead to a dog happily learning things you never dreamed of! Continue reading →

Clicker Basics

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Three things to understand about using the clicker –

  1. You will click one time when your dog does a behavior you like.

    2. Timing is everything! Pretend you’re taking a snapshot of the desired behavior. Click at exactly the instant that the behavior is happening. This means you should start the click when you see the dog’s muscles tense to sit or move. A touch early will probably mean you’re clicking on time. And what you’re really clicking is the dog’s decision or intent to move.

  2. Each click must be followed by a reward.

    3. The reward can be a treat, or play, or a ride in the car (rather time consuming), a sniff at a tree… The goal is for the reward to be truly rewarding to the dog, not what you think should be rewarding to the dog.

  3. The click ends the behavior.

    4. As soon as he hears the click, the dog is “allowed” to get up, or change otherwise out of the position you were clicking.

Charge!

To the dog, the click means the following:

  1. What he just did at the instant you clicked was what you will be rewarding him for.
  2. The click is always followed by a reward. Every time. 100%. The dog’s human must not fail!

To teach the dog these simple things, follow these steps:

  1. Put 10-15 small pieces of yummy food in one hand and a clicker in your other hand. Your dog is with you. You may attach the leash to a hook, stand on it – just secure it so the dog is safe and won’t wander away. Pretty soon he won’t even think of wandering away!
  2. Click once and give your dog a treat. Reach down and put the treat in his mouth. The dog does not have to do anything to earn the click or the treat; he just has to be there to eat it.
  3. Repeat.
  4. Repeat.
  5. Repeat until all treats are gone.

You’ll probably notice that at about click #5 or #6 the dog is looking at you sharply when he hears the click. This is good.

If the dog shows no interest in the food, he might be full from a meal, the food might not be yummy enough for him, he could be stressed by the environment, or he could be dead. You’d probably notice that. We can deal with these other issues.

You have just “charged the clicker,” i.e., “classically conditioned” the dog to anticipate a food reward when he hears a click. His association with the click is a good one. You will be using this conditioned response to teach him many things.

What next? See Shaping a Behavior

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