Clicker training is a wonderful way to communicate with your dog. It gives you a “bridge”, or a way to speak to another species without having to resort to pain to get that information across. It’s also based on the natural laws of learning as they apply to all species--even humans.
The clicker is used as a “marker”, and is like the click of a camera: it isolates a moment in time for the dog. It’s INFORMATION to the animal, and lets them know two important things: exactly WHEN they have done something as you want it, and it tells the dog that “something good is now going to happen” (probably a treat of food).
So the clicker is a marker--a marker with scalpel-like accuracy. We use markers all the time in our lives. Think about the last time someone scratched your back. When they hit the really itchy spot, what did you do? Probably went, “Ahhh!” and let the scratcher know he’d hit the right spot. You used a “marker” to deliver information.
You marked the moment and the place on your back with that “Ahhhh!” you wanted the scratcher to remember. You could have clicked a clicker and delivered the same info. The clicker, like the “Ahhhh!” is a universal language every species can understand, once conditioned.
We’ve been marking moments in dog training forever: this is not new. But what’s new is that we have, up until now, been marking the moments of ERROR instead of SUCCESS.
In traditional command-based training, incorrect behaviors offered by the dog are “corrected” or punished. We can’t deny that training with pain works, but many of us now want to find ways to communicate with our animals which does not depend on marking the moment of failure with pain.
Clicker training gives us that opportunity. With the clicker, we can set the dog up for success, mark that moment of success and reinforce it, rather than set the dog up to fail and correct the errors.
In clicker training, we realize learning means making mistakes, and making choices. We can’t learn without making mistakes. It’s normal, natural. Imagine you’re teaching a child to walk. In those first unbalanced steps, the child makes many mistakes. He might lurch and fall many times before he finally figures out how to walk all the way across a room.
Do we think of punishing the child for stumbling and falling? Of course not! So why do we punish our dogs while they are learning new things? It’s no more necessary than it is when coaching that child to learn to walk smoothly.
When we stop thinking of “correcting” mistakes, and instead think of learning in terms of making mistakes to figure out what is right, then learning becomes a joy. It becomes stress-free. The animal, no longer afraid of being punished, begins to offer many behaviors to choose from. He becomes an active participant in training, a partner. We don’t have to force compliance. We don’t “command”.
Before you begin imparting information to your dog via the clicker, you need to “charge up the clicker” and get your dog to first understand that the click means something good is coming. He will not understand yet that it means you are marking a moment of excellence that you want him to remember.
First, just click the clicker ONCE and toss a treat to the dog. Use a delicious, soft treat--and a tiny one. Soft tiny treats are quickly ingested, and you don’t have to wait while the dog chews. Be sure you don’t go “clickityclickityclickity”, clicking repeatedly. This will diffuse the strength of the click, and confuse the dog. One click only if you want the click to mean something, to “mark that moment” of success.
Repeat this several times and soon your dog will be looking up at you in anticipation of that click and treat. At this point, you can begin pairing the click with a behavior the dog is giving you. The easiest may be simply “attention.” When dog gives you total attention, click and follow up with a treat. Do this all over the house and outside as well.
This is cementing the information that the clicker “marks” a moment in time and that whenever the dog hears the click, what he was doing at that exact moment is what will earn him the treat.
Look for “behaviors” you can click and reinforce. All dogs offer behaviors of some kind. If the dog sits, looking up at you, you can reinforce either the sit or the attention, depending on when you click the clicker.
If you want to reinforce the sit, you simply click the moment the dog’s butt hits the floor, and deliver the treat.
If you want to reinforce the attention, just click as soon as the dog makes eye contact. Likewise, you can also reinforce head turning, licking, tail wagging--whatever you want.
Timing the click is crucial: click too soon and you’ve reinforced a crouch instead of a sit. Click too late and you’ve reinforced kicking of the back legs instead of pottying in the correct spot outdoors. Timing is everything.
You can pair luring with clicker training quite easily. You don’t always have to wait to “capture” a behavior the dog offers in order to click and reinforce. You can set the dog up, lure him into the behavior then mark the moment of success.
For example, one way to train a “sit” is to lure with a treat, pulling the treat over the dog’s head until the butt hits the ground. With a clicker, this behavior can be learned quickly, without having to physically touch the dog. No pushing down of the back end, or pulling with the leash. Just lure, and click when the dog is in position.
What the clicker does is remove the “fuzzy edges” for the dog. It tells him exactly when he’s got it right, when he’s figured it out, with incredible precision. This is why the clicker is such a powerful tool in training long, complicated chains of behaviors. Each link of the chain is taught separately, with one success naturally leading to the next link of the chain of learning.
In clicker training, we don’t pair the “cue” or “command” with the behavior until the dog is reliably offering us that behavior. Think about it. The dog has no idea what “sit” means. It’s like someone telling you “zapglob!” and you have no idea what they mean. It becomes a distraction, because it has no meaning yet to the animal.
Instead, we train the behavior first. And, once the dog is offering this same behavior each time we pull the clicker out, in hopes of being “marked” and “reinforced,” only then do we begin to attach the cue.
If you can reasonably bet $20 that the next time you pull out your clicker, the dog will offer up a nice “sit”, then it’s time to add the word or signal to indicate “sit.”
In clicker training, we don’t use the word “command” because we are not commanding our dogs to perform. There is no “or else.” Instead, we are using a signal or cue to prompt the dog to perform a behavior they already know.
We attach the cue by adding the word just BEFORE we click. For example, if you are training your dog to eliminate on cue by clicking just as the dog is almost finished urinating, then you’d begin introducing the word just before your click. It might look like this:
Dog lifts leg, begins to urinate. As stream nears the end, handler says “Park” or whatever word is chosen, and immediately clicks and treats. In a short time, the dog will expect the word prompt or cue before the click. Then the dog will offer the behavior whenever you say the cue or signal.
In general, when training new behaviors, you use one click and one treat. Each time you click, you offer a treat. To click without offering a treat is not only confusing to the dog, but lying to it. It breaks the contract. The click promises a treat is coming as well as marks a moment. If you click and not offer a treat, you are weakening the effectiveness of the clicker.
Now, that does not mean that for the rest of your life you have to click and treat to get a dog to offer behaviors. Not at all. The one click=one treat is for the beginning. You can begin asking for more than one repetition of a behavior before you click. You can ask for twofers or threefers, once the behavior is understood.
The term for this is “variable reinforcement” and simply means that we don’t have to reinforce every behavior, but can gradually ask for multiple behaviors before clicking and treating. We can also use this to refine the behaviors, and to pick only the best ones to reinforce. This is much like how a slot machine works.
Obviously, we don’t get a payoff every time we put our quarter in the slot machine. But because we HAVE gotten a payoff before, we keep stuffing those quarters in, in hopes that the next pull of the lever might give us the bells and whistles (the marker) and the payoff (treats). Dogs respond to this type of variable reinforcement in much the same way as humans. It can be a powerful reinforcer, and can sharpen up performance.
This is especially helpful to understand when working on increasing speed of responses. Slow sits? Slow downs? Use a variable reinforcement schedule and watch the dog begin offering responses at warp speed.
You can also train complicated behavior chains--such as the retrieve--with a clicker very quickly. When taught in small increments, the clicker gives you a way to isolate each link and perfect the response before having to move on to the next link.
Helpful is a “keep going” signal of some kind, to let the dog know he’s doing it right and to “keep going”, don’t stop. Since the click ENDS the behavior, we need something to impart the “keep going” info to the dog. I use the word “Goooooood”, long and drawn out.
An example of this is how well it works for teaching a nice solid down-stay. In traditional command-based training, the dog is punished for breaking the stay. In clicker training, if a dog breaks, we realize it’s a handler error, not the dog’s! WE have asked too much of the dog too quickly.
For instance, if our dogs are doing a nice 30 second down stay, we don’t then jump to asking for 60 seconds. We move up incrementally, reinforcing for 40 second stays, 50 second stays. Incrementally, we can set the dogs up for success and mark and reinforce the behaviors we want: that quiet, long down stay.
I use that “keep going” signal a lot while training for long down and sit stays. It gives the dog information, reassures them, and sets them up for success.
With clicker training, long grueling training sessions are not needed. They are also not desirable. Short, 3-5 minute sessions spread throughout a day work splendidly. Informal training sessions like this are great fun for the dog and the handler!
I train a lot in the bathroom, on the sofa, in bed or while I’m waiting in the car in the bank line. I keep clickers in every room to “catch” cute behaviors I want to eventually put on cue--like the cute puppy bow my young Papillon offers each time he rises from sleep. I keep treats--like a can of cat “Pounce” treats in every room next to my clicker. That way I’m always ready to “capture” a moment in time.
But the clicker can be used also for developing many “safety” behaviors, such as a nice, solid recall. There is no behavior more important for your dog to know. To do this effectively, choose a word like “COME” that you want the dog to respond to. Do this in the house, in a familiar environment with as few distractions as possible. have great treats ready.
Call the dog’s name. Then, as the dog begins to move toward you--those FIRST steps, give your recall word, “COME!” in an upbeat, happy voice and CLICK once and hold out a treat for the dog. Let the dog come to you.
Repeat this over and over several times, then move it into different rooms. Don’t try doing it outside, with distractions until you have it well-generalized inside, without distractions. Key to success: Never use the COME word unless you have a good reinforcer. Never use the COME word outside, or when there is any chance you think the dog will be too distracted to respond.
If you use the recall word (whichever word you choose) carelessly, you will diffuse the effectiveness of it. You want that magic word to ALWAYS mean “something good is coming.” Each time you use the word and the dog doesn’t respond, you have effectively used “variable reinforcement” to let the dog know he doesn’t HAVE to come. It’s the slot machine effect. We know when we put our quarter in the slot machine it won’t pay off every time, but it has paid off before, therefore it may do it again.
If the dog knows he will get better reinforcement from the squirrels he’s watching, the cat, the great smells on the ground--he will go for that instead of responding to the cue. Make the payoff GOOD while you are training this behavior and it will pay off in the long run. Consistency is so important!
Clicker training is FUN for both dog and handler, and dogs begin to enjoy the challenge of “making their owners click and treat them.” There are an abundance of excellent resources for learning more about clicker training online.
Point your web browser tohttp://www/dontshootthedog.com for a visit to Karen Pryor’s website, chock full of great “get started” articles, books, videos, clickers and target sticks to purchase.
Also check out http://www.clickandtreat.com, to visit the website of Gary Wilkes, the clicker trainer and behaviorist who writes a monthly column called “On Good Behavior” for Dog Fancy magazine. Gary has posted many of his articles, and they are excellent. He also offers many excellent products, including his “Click and Treat Kit”, a beginning “how to” video, with an excellent booklet and two clickers.
For wonderful ideas on how to get started, check out Helix Fairweather’s “Keeper Pages” . Tons of excellent posts from the Clicktrain email discussion list. These are posts list members would respond to with “Wow, this is a Keeper!”. Well, Helix kept them, and now has them organized beautifully for everyone interested in clicker training. This site not only offers beginners great “how to” starting advice, but addresses advanced problems, clicker training other animals, and using clicker training with humans. A “must see” website!
So, pull out that clicker, charge it up, and begin the dance of communication!
