Posts Tagged ‘clicker training’

Lure and Reward Dog training is a method that teaches the dog that behaviors that we like, are rewarded with something good. Most often people think of rewarding a dog with food – and yes, that does work, but a reward in dog training can be anything the dog likes.

A reward can be letting a dog sniff, run, go outside, chase a toy or ball, play with another dog, eat their dinner, or even get a treat. The lure is what we use to get the dog into a specific position. For example, when we teach sit, we put a treat in front of their nose, get their head to look up to the sky – as that happens the rear end usually hits the ground. When it does, we give the treat. Once they do it 3-4 times, we switch to some other type of dog training reward and we randomly choose what a good reward will be – this will help the dog learn to not only follow the treat, but to also perform the behavior without a treat in his nose. This is the best type of dog training for all dogs!

Clicker Training

A clicker is a small piece of plastic / metal that makes a sharp click noise. This is primarily used with more advanced dog trainers and some dog trianing clubs that really have success at it. The benefit is that you can mark the behavior specifically. So if you are working on sit, you would click when the rear end goes down – that acts as a bridge between when the behavior happened and when they got the treat. The clicker works best with more precise dog training such as agility or tricks. You can also get into something called shaping which is where you wait for behaviors to happen and click them when they do – if you were teaching "down" eventually your dog will get tired and lay down – you could click that in order to teach it rather than using a treat to lure the dog. I like clicker dog training for more advanced dog training classes or for fearful or aggressive dog problems. It helps to have that added layer of dog training communication.

Traditional Dog Training

Most people who did any type of dog training class 10-20 years ago, typically used traditional dog training methods. The dog training instructor will put a choke collar or pinch / prong collar on the dog. When the dog is doing something right you praise the dog and sometimes use food as a reward, but when the dog does something wrong, you use the collar to correct the dog. In order to issue a dog training type correction, you pull the leash upward and slightly to the side in order to "pop" or "choke" the dog – the collar tightens around the dogs neck. The upside to this is that you are providing information to the dog – rewarding what you like, punishing what you dont like. Unfortunately you are using pain in order to communicate that message. The belief now, is that we dont need to use pain in dog training, that we can use the rewards or other types of consequences that aren’t painful in order to change the behavior. I also find that the dog typically doesn’t fully know the behavior before they are getting corrected. Finally, the dog tends to learn they can ignore the behavior when the collar is off.

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Surviving Puppyhood Dealing with puppy chewing

Dani Weinberg

“I’m too old for this,” I thought, wiping up yet another puppy piddle from the kitchen floor. Surely, puppies, like human infants, should be raised only by the young and healthy. On second thought, maybe even the young and healthy develop a few grey hairs in the process.

Ruby was our first puppy in over 7 years, and I was experiencing the all-too-common Return to Reality. I remembered our previous puppy as having been “easy.” Had I simply forgotten? Come to think of it, what about those two (or was it three) remote controls that had been eaten? And my prescription sunglasses? And what about our wonderful Oriental rug, a legacy from my mother, that had been chewed through in several places? And what about….and what about…and what about….The memories were beginning to flood in. I decided to sit down, have a cup of coffee (Ruby was zonked out in her crate), and think about my promised article for Forward.

We privileged few who are trainers live in a dream world. For a few hours every week, we teach puppy classes. We get to watch our little canine students grow, develop, and learn – and we get to send them home at the end of the hour. We hear all about their awful antics on the phone between classes. We patiently explain to their owners about developmental stages and how to manage them. We sometimes wonder why these owners seem so frantic and so inept
at following our simple suggestions.

Puppy chewing on the furniture? No problem. Just make the furniture taste bad and offer puppy something delicious (and “appropriate”) to chew on instead. Puppy nipping at the heels of the children?
No problem. Just teach the kids to stop acting like prey animals. Puppy yowling all night in his crate? No problem. Just ignore the “unwanted” behavior until it “extinguishes” (most of us, to our credit, actually say “stops”). And please do keep up with your training. It’s so important for puppy to learn to sit on cue.

It all makes perfect sense in theory. But what happens when one of us privileged few gets her own live-in, full-time, for-better-or-for-worse puppy? Shock,
delight, exhaustion, some new watchbands and eyeglass cases – and the incomparable experiencing of falling in love again.

I brought Ruby home when she was 7 weeks old. The very next day, I started her training. During the previous seven puppyless years, I’d learned a lot and had become quite a proficient clicker trainer and instructor. I now had an opportunity for firsthand experience
with the techniques I had been teaching so many students. Experimenting on Ruby, I modified or simplified some of these techniques and raised my standards on others. For example, knowing that Ruby was headed for a brilliant career in Obedience, I knew I had to teach her Utility-quality
behaviors right from the start. I was not willing to put in the
time and energy later on to retrain a rocked-back Sit or a forward-folding
Down. Clicker training made it easy to do it right the first time.

I also had my own private hands-on “seminar” in puppy
individuality! For example, Ruby was so much more visual than auditory.
She focused easily on hand signals as cues and took much longer
to learn the verbal counterparts. Even now, at the age of 10 months,
she’s just beginning to get the meaning of the verbal cue
“Stand,” though she’s responded fluently to the
visual cue for several months now.

I wish I had videotaped our first day of training. It was so easy
and so much fun – a powerful confirmation of everything I
had been telling my students about clicker training and about starting
with baby puppies. On that first day, I spent just a couple of minutes
conditioning the clicker and then started right in with teaching
Sit. Since Ruby was offering Sit spontaneously, I didn’t do any
prompting but just caught the behavior with the clicker. I did have
to prompt Down at first but very quickly stopped and just waited
for her to offer it. For the next few weeks, I thoroughly enjoyed
the relaxation of not introducing cues until I was absolutely sure
I had the behavior in exactly the form I wanted. Once again, I experienced
affirmation of my belief that the clicker really was an excellent
communication and information device – much more powerful
than the linguistic sounds we utter, thinking that somehow our dogs
will understand what we mean by them.

In those first few weeks, I was also teaching a lot of basic household-manners
skills, using eye-contact training as a foundation. Ruby quickly
generalized the behavior to all permission-requesting situations
(like getting out of the crate or going through a doorway). I clicker-trained
her to use the dog door (which she could barely reach at first)
so that she’d have quick and easy access to the outdoors for elimination.
But I left nothing else to chance about her housetraining. This
was probably the most grueling part of that first week or two for
me. Being committed to accomplishing the housetraining quickly and
completely, I knew that I had to be present to reinforce her every
time she eliminated outdoors. Now, puppies do a lot of peeing! And
they do it around the clock! Within a week, though, she was sleeping
5 to 6 hours every night. During the daytime, on the other hand,
I found myself spending more and more time outdoors, balancing a
cup of coffee on the arm of the lawn chair and watching her for
that precious moment when I could say “Gooooood girl.”

By the time Ruby was 10 weeks old, she knew the following behaviors:
a tuck Sit (on visual cue), a foldback Down (on visual cue), Eye
Contact (on verbal cue), Leave It (from hand, on verbal cue), back-and-forth
Recalls (moving among 2-3 people), the beginning of a Mark (as in
Utility Gloves), stick and hand targeting (on verbal cue), the beginning
of a Go Out (using targeting), and a few tricks (Spin, Roll Over,
High Five). I tried to start loose-leash walking, but she was still
too short, and I didn’t want to present her with a distorted picture
of my body posture.

She loved training from the very start. She seemed to think it
was not work but play. It was clear that the more she learned, the
more she was capable of learning. Very quickly – as soon as
she knew a couple of behaviors – she began to offer behaviors
spontaneously. And in no time at all, she became my teacher just
as I was hers.

After extensive discussion with Ruby and with her permission, I
offer the following :

Seven Rules of Puppy Training.

1. Remember: your puppy is perfect – and normal! With this
as your starting point, everything else will fall into place.

2. Clear your calendar! If you train with positive methods, your
puppy will be a training addict in no time! Your problem will be
how to stop training because your puppy will think it’s all play
and will want to do it all the time.

3. Feel free to invent all kinds of new tricks and training techniques
as you and your puppy build your relationship. Your puppy will teach
you a lot – maybe even more than you’ll teach your puppy!

4. Set yourself only short-term goals – and don’t take those
too seriously either. Puppies change, grow, develop before your
very eyes, so what you thought you wanted to do or were doing at
this moment will (and should) change in the next moment.

5. Take your time about introducing cues (beyond the cues that
emerge naturally from any luring or prompting you do). Language
isn’t important to dogs anyway. And you’ll become a better trainer
if you immerse yourself in dog language. My motto is: “Think
Small/Go Slow.”

6. When something goes wrong or doesn’t seem to be working –
forget it! It will all be different by tomorrow anyway (see Rule
3 above). Seriously, like many health problems, puppy behavior "problems" mostly resolve themselves, as long as we don’t get in the way.

7. And, most important, have fun. They don’t stay puppies nearly
long enough, so enjoy them while you can.

© Dani Weinberg, 2001

Dani Weinberg
Albuquerque, New Mexico
daniw@earthlink.net

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