I'd be interested in your thoughts and tips - or is it just another fad?
Thanks
Dog Training Aids - Do You Know How Safe The Methods Used For Dog Obedience Training Are?
Recommended Answer:I was a traditional/ balanced obedience person for over 19 years, I used marker training with shy and feral dog rehab but never got into the entire "clicker thing". The last trainer I worked under was the definition of "Traditional" and she almost broke my dog, my dog was defined as "stubborn", "dominant" and "passive aggressive" by her. My girl was starting to become reactive and fearful of other dogs and was only escalating with each class. About this time, I started free shaping with the clicker to teach her more advanced tricks and behaviors at her agents request. I decided to fire the trainer and switch over to positive reinforcement based methods such as the clicker, my dogs issues resolved in about a week. Positive reinforcement is a scientifically proven method of quickly training animals, it is not a fad. Typically the only people wou will hear calling clicker training a fad are old school traditional or balanced trainers who do not want to go back to school and think PhDs are for dummies. Examples of clicker trained dogs that I know include Paige and Jesse.
add: Tasha, my border collie gets more excited for a "click" than a "good girl".
The Importance of Dog Training
- It most definately is NOT a fad. Why? Because it works. It's really just operant conditioning, i.e. associating the click with positive stimulus.
Here's the downside though: we should be constantly reinforcing commands or teaching new commands and it's very difficult to carry a clicker with you all the time. There's an easy solution though: instead of a click use a marker i.e. a word used in place of a click, e.g. yes. So the second a command is performed properly say "yes" then treat - eventually treats will be intermittent, but saying "yes" will be constant. You can use other markers like "no" if your dog is doing something wrong or something you don't want her to do or "good" as an interim marker, e.g. your dog fetches a ball, you can say good as she's bringing it to you, and then "yes" when she delivers it to you and fulfils the command.
Again, clicker training is great, but for most people marker training is more practical.
- Clicker training works for any species with a brain. Animal Behavior Enterprise (ABE) worked with over 140 species, and thousands of individual animals, reliably trained for commercial and govenrment use, sometimes requiring the animals to be away from the handlers for extended periods of time. They trained dolphins to do open ocean work, birds to take pictures, and cats to follow people for spy work. Many zoos have now converted to using clicker training for animal husbandry behaviors, such as teaching an otter to pee in a cup, a dophin to postition itself to get a tube shoved down its throat, or a gorilla to put an arm through a slot to get a daily injection of insulin.
Clicker training is not as easy as some people assume, and so don't apply the principles correctly, and find it doesn't work well for them. I don't know anyone who has sucessfully clicker trained an animal who then had major trouble with another animal ("it doesn't work for all dogs") but do know many who gave up on it as not working for them, blamining the technique rather than their application of it. Many of the principles of clicker training can be incorporated using a verbal marker, but most people are more sloppy in their use of a verbal marker than when using a mechanical marker. You do not need to carry a clicker around for the rest of your life- the clicker is used in the teaching phase, then weaned off.
If interested in clicker training, I suggest the clickersolutions.com website and join the list group, and watch some videos on youtube by kikopup, lovecanines, and supernaturalbc. This is a good introduction to clicker training:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC367wKGi…
- Yeah it works but it doesn't do the training for you… the clicker just lets the dog no he/she did good its basically a substitute from saying “good dog” but it works in the sense that the dog realizes hes done well after hearing the click, and knows hes going to get a treat.
- Before we got our dog we had a bunch of questions, what kind etc.
I found this program on the internet and it worked for me on my dog mybe it will help you.
After going through the guide, I can now see that this can work for any dog problem, because of the the way it was put together. I highly recommend this guide to any dog owner that has a problem they need to sort out.
- Yes it works good... And the clicker gets the dogs attention to focus on you. Remember to say good girl or boy the clicker does not sub for that
- It works great if you do it properly.
