asking for any kind of behaviors from the dog—we just want them to start making the connection that the click means good things (treats) are coming.
After a couple of short training sessions like that, ask your dog to do something they already know how to do, like “sit,” and, right as they get into the appropriate position, click, praise, and treat. Repeat a few times. The goal is for our dogs to understand that the click is our way of telling them that what they are doing in that moment is what we want when we give them a specific cue.
Keep your training sessions short when introducing the clicker and all the other training we are going to be doing. A few short (five minutes or less) training sessions spread through the day is much more effective (and fun) for your dog than one long training session. My goal with training is to always end a session with my dog having been successful and having had fun—essentially, you want to end with your dog wanting to do more, not bored and frustrated.
Sirius and I had a wonderful time at Clicker Expo 2019.
If you are interested in learning more about clicker training, check out the work of Karen Pryor, Karen Pryor Academy, and her Clicker Expo annual conference. Learn more at karenpryoracademy.com. If you are interested in animal behavior and training and have the opportunity to attend Clicker Expo, I can’t recommend it highly enough. They also have a variety of online learning opportunities, and a growing number of positive-reinforcement-based trainers across the country and around the world are incorporating clicker training into their classes.
Patience
Dog training can be exhausting and overwhelming. We’re communicating with a completely different species, and sometimes asking them to do very unnatural things, like putting a little ball into a little basketball hoop! It’s important to make sure that you train when you are in a good mood and in a good place to keep your training sessions fun and positive. Different dogs learn at different speeds. Don’t compare your dog with someone else’s dog, or, if you share your life with multiple dogs, don’t compare one dog to another. Different dogs learn differently, and even learn different kinds of tricks at different speeds. For example, my dog Charlotte learns anything with small details very quickly, but is much slower to learn tricks that require her to position her body in certain ways, a skill set that my youngest dog, Sirius, excels at.
Our dogs are individuals; there are some tricks that your dog will enjoy more than others. Our dogs learn through repetition; again, you want to train more frequently in short, fun training sessions with lots of toys and treats. Dogs do learn through repetition, but you can do too much of a good thing. No one likes a drill sergeant (even a fun one), so, if you find your dog seeming to be a little less enthusiastic in your training sessions, you might have just worked a certain behavior a little too much for the moment. It’s important to keep your training sessions varied and short. Work on teaching a new trick alongside practicing a trick your dog has successfully mastered, and always be sure to end each training session on a positive note—create an opportunity for your dog to be successful, even if that means having to lower the criteria of what you are asking for. Keep your training sessions short and sweet. A few short (under-five-minute) training sessions a few times a day will be more effective than one forty-five-minute training session.
HINT: If your dog isn’t consistently successful in your training sessions, it’s probably because you are asking for too much too soon. Slow down, make the criteria easier, and then slowly build up to the full behavior that you are trying to achieve.
Ways of Training
There are a variety of techniques we will be utilizing to support your dog in understanding the tricks we want to teach them. When our dogs are first learning a trick or skill, this is how we will show them what we want them to do, or communicate to them what we want them to do.
Luring
This is pretty much what it sounds like: we will be using treats to lure or maneuver our dog into the desired position. Luring is a fast and easy way to teach a lot of tricks, because we are able to use treats to lead them to a behavior or position that we want. So, for example, your dog’s nose follows the treat, the body follows, and your dog ends up in the position you want—say “sit,” for example. You click and/or praise and give your dog the treat. As your dog gets more comfortable with the behavior, you are able to phase out the physical lure.
Shaping
With shaping, your dog is actually getting to put together the pieces of the trick without your prompting or leading. Shaping easily goes hand in hand with clicker training (though you can also use a verbal marker). With shaping, you are clicking or marking very small incremental behavioral changes while engaging with an object. The exciting thing about shaping as a training methodology is that your dog is actively thinking and puzzling out the behavior, which can be very rewarding, empowering, and confidence-building for them, creating a training conversation between you and your dog. An example of what this would look like is: if you wanted to teach your dog to push a ball with their nose, you might take out a beach ball and have a clicker (or be ready with a verbal marker your dog is familiar with, like “yes”) and a lot of treats. To start, you will click and treat for any movement toward the ball, then click and treat for sniffing at the ball. If your dog paws at the ball, you would just ignore that, and then when the dog sniffs the ball hard enough to push it, you would click, praise, and jackpot, giving lots of treats. Your dog is essentially puzzling out what kind of engagement with the ball gets the reward, and will offer more of the behaviors that are getting rewarded, thus creating the finished trick, to which you can then add a verbal cue.
Capturing
This isn’t always the fastest way to teach a trick, but it is a really fun process, and can be extremely effective for teaching tricks that are physically subtle (like head tilts, shaking, licking, leg lifting, etc.). To teach a trick via capturing, you will be clicking and/or verbally marking something your dog does, each time you see them do it. So, for example, if you want to teach your dog to shake on cue, each time you see them shake off after waking up or coming in from the rain, you will click, praise, and treat, and begin adding in a verbal marker, like “shake.” With time and repetition, your dog will begin to figure out that they are being rewarded for shaking their body and that the verbal marker you have attached to it—“shake” in this example—will become your cue to ask your dog to perform the behavior at any time.
Signals
As we get into the trick training, we will be using both verbal and physical cues or signals to our dogs to indicate what trick we want them to be doing. These signals are the way our dogs know what tricks we want them to do. Here’s an overview of how we will be communicating with our dogs as we teach them tricks.
1.Just like it sounds, a verbal signal is a word that we have taught our dogs to associate with a specific trick or physical behavior we want them to do.
2.With physical signals, which are often, though not always, hand signals, your dog associates the physical cue with the trick you want them to do. Dogs are extremely attuned to our body language, and so are very responsive to physical cues, alone or paired with verbal signals. Dogs are consistently watching our bodies, so they often take very quickly to physical cues. For tricks taught via luring, the physical cue can often be a less exaggerated form of the way you initially lured the behavior, something your dog will already be familiar with at that point.
Building Duration
With some tricks, we want our dog to perform the behavior and keep moving by, say, weaving between our legs while we walk—we don’t want them to stop because we would then probably trip over them and fall! Not fun! With other tricks, like “sit,”
