different treats and note what gets your dog the most excited.
Sometimes finding your dog’s currency requires a little bit of trial and error. It also might require you to do some carrying of treats—what is high-value today might be less high-value tomorrow, so you’ll have to pull out something else. I like to rotate the treats I’m giving when training among different high-value ones. Find your dog’s currency—even if it isn’t high-value to you, it might be to them! Different dogs will find different things valuable. Try different treats and play to see what motivates your dog most and use that. As you are finding your dog’s currency, also experiment with play and toys. You’ll still need to have high-value treats for some training, but for some tricks, if your dog is toy-motivated, start to incorporate different toys. A lot of working dogs, like search and rescue, police, and military dogs, work for play and toys (retrieve, and especially tug), so if your dog is most excited about toys, they are in good company.
Even if toys are the highest-value reward to your dog, you will want to have a variety of treats available when you’re training—you can even incorporate your dog’s kibble into your training! Just reserve kibble or other lower-value treats for practicing trick skills that your dog is already confident and having fun with, and pull out the higher-value treats when you are teaching something new, or practicing in a new or more distracting location.
Safety First
If you are training outside and not in a fenced yard, it’s important to always have your dog on leash. The best thing to have is a plain six-foot nylon or leather leash. Avoid retractable leashes, because they can cause a lot of injury to you and/or your dog and don’t give you a lot of control over where your dog is. Following leash laws is a simple but important part of being a good canine citizen. Dogs aren’t robots; even if you think your dog has a good recall, they likely don’t—if another animal ran past and you called your dog, would he immediately turn and return to you? If yes, that’s fantastic, but still keep the leash on, for the comfort and safety of other dogs and members of the community. Following leash laws, scooping poop, and keeping your dog(s) close to you and under your control helps to make the general public more accepting of us having our dogs with us in (dog-friendly) places, and keeps places dog-friendly and welcoming to all of our dogs. You’ll also want to have your dog on a collar, head halter, or chest harness. Safe options include flat collars (nylon or leather), limited-slip martingales (which tighten down to a point that keeps a dog from backing out of a collar, but don’t constrict the dog’s breathing), head halters (like the halters horses wear), and back or front clip harnesses are all safe options for your dog if you are walking or trick training in public spaces. Be sure to avoid prong collars, choke chains, and shock collars/ e-collars—pain conditioning should have no place in dog training.
Teaching Your Dog about Learning
Dogs are not born knowing how to communicate with us—or rather, they aren’t born knowing what our words mean. Over time, your dog learns about how to interact with you; they learn what our likes and dislikes are, what our words and gestures and body language mean. Our dogs are always learning from us, every moment of every day. Our dogs learn good things that we want, like to go potty outside, but our dogs are also learning not-so-good things, like that they don’t have to come until you say “come,” “coooooooooommmmmeeeeeee,” “plleeeeaaaaasssseee coooommmmmeeeee,” ten times and jump up and down. When we don’t set our dogs up for success, when we aren’t clear about our expectations for them and don’t create circumstances where they are going to be successful, we often end up training our dogs in things we don’t mean to (for example, that “come” isn’t a verbal cue in and of itself, and that when we want our dogs to come, we will do that whole literal dance and say “come” a bunch of times). This doesn’t mean that you need to “teach your dog who is boss” or otherwise force them. Quite the opposite, our goal with training should be to make working with us the most fun option, eliminating the opportunity for our dogs to make mistakes—so, for example, only taking your dog into your yard or to the park on leash with lots of high-value treats, so you can support and reward the “come” recall to the point when the behavior is solidly understood by your dog and they think it’s a lot of fun to come racing back because it doesn’t mean the end to play, it means yummy treats and more playing. We want to make engaging with us the most rewarding option available to our dogs.
Next to treats, patience is the most important thing to have when you are starting to teach your dog tricks. We talk to our dogs all day long, but a lot of what we say doesn’t make sense to them. Dogs don’t come pre-programmed to understand what different words mean. Training your dog is about building a relationship and developing a shared language. Your dog has to learn what those random noises coming out of your mouth mean, and the only way that can happen is with positive training, patience, and fun repetition. Our dogs are going to get confused or make mistakes, but nothing they are doing is really a mistake. If our dog fails to do a trick in the way we want them to, it means that they aren’t ready for the level of difficulty. It’s a moment for us to step back and help our dogs to be successful.
No Punishment
There is no place for punishment in tricks. If you find yourself getting overwhelmed and frustrated, it’s time to give your dog a treat and take a break. There are a lot of reasons not to punish your dog in general—causing your dog pain or fear or discomfort while learning is contradictory to the learning you want your dog to do, and doesn’t help them to retain information. Ideas like your dog needing to be dominated or shown who is “alpha” have been discredited by canine behavior and training researchers. Dogs are not “mini wolves”; they are not looking at us as “pack leaders.” Essentially, you want training with your dog to come from a place of mutual respect and fun. All training, especially trick training, should be enjoyable for both of you, not something that makes your dog overwhelmed or shut down.
Positive Reinforcement
I define positive-reinforcement-based training as methods that come from a place of mutual respect, without use of fear, pain, or intimidation. Basically, this means training that centers the relationship between the person and the animal, and doesn’t use tools like shock collars/e-collars and prong collars that cause pain to communicate what the human wants.
Clicker Training
One method of positive reinforcement training that is useful for all animals, from puppies to goldfish, is clicker training. Clicker training is based on marking a desired behavior and then providing a reward for it. The reason that a clicker (those little box-shaped devices that are sold for about a dollar on the counter of most pet shops, that have a button and make a metallic “click” noise when pressed) works is because trainers are able to deliver the click more clearly, quickly, and more precisely than a verbal marker or food reward alone. The approach grew out of trainers working with marine mammals, and has taken the dog training industry by storm because of its ease and effectiveness. Basically, clicker training lets us communicate more clearly with all animals, from cats and horses and rats to wildlife like dolphins and zebras! Yes, really—the same methods people use to teach an elephant, you can use to teach your dog! Pretty cool, right?
Clicker training is successful because it allows trainers to clearly “mark” (a.k.a. communicate to the dog) that they have performed a specific behavior that is desirable, and then come in and reward with a treat. Essentially, it allows us to improve our communication with our dogs as we are training, because the clicker is such a clear signal to our dogs (once they’re properly introduced to it) that we can use it to mark very small behavior cues, enabling us to train very impressive and specific tricks, like dunking a ball in a basketball hoop.
If you want to give clicker training a go, get a clicker (again you can find them inexpensively at most pet stores) and a bowl of very small pieces of very high-value treat. When you first introduce clicker training to your dog, your only goal is for your dog to associate the click with something great (the treat). So, you will click, and treat,
