Click and Treat:
A Softer,
behaved Dog or Cat or Bird or…
by Eamon Patrick Riley
Smokey
and the Bandit, two 6-month-old Doberman pinchers, sit waiting to see which one
is going to go first. As I walk up to their gate, they leap with
excitement. After a few weeks of training they know what to
expect. It is time for work and work is fun. They have already mastered
the basics: the heel, the sit, and the down commands. These dogs have never
felt the jerk of a leash or the pinch of a collar to learn these
commands. Instead, clicker training has been used to take the dogs’
natural behavior and shape it into desired behavior. What is clicker training?
Clicker
training is a training method for teaching behavior
with positive reinforcement. You use the sound of a toy clicker to tell the
animal when it's doing what you want. The system was first widely used by
dolphin trainers, who needed a way to teach behavior
without using physical force, and it has become increasingly popular with other
animal trainers because of its gentle methods. The
scientific term for it is operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is
the way any animal interacts with and learns from its environment. An
animal tends to repeat an action that has a positive outcome and tends not to
repeat one that has negative ones.
In
order for the animal to connect the positive reinforcement to the behavior that he is doing, the reinforcement must occur, as the behavior is happening, not
afterwards. The actual reinforcement can't always be gotten to the animal at
that precise instant, however. Trainers needed to find another way of letting
the animal know that it was doing the right thing, so they began using a
conditioned reinforcer. A conditioned reinforcer is anything that the animal wouldn't ordinarily
work to get. A primary reinforcer,
on the other hand, is something that the animal automatically finds rewarding.
When a conditioned reinforcer is paired with a
primary reinforcer, like a treat or a pat, they
become of equal importance to the animal. Enter the clicker.
The
clicker is a small plastic box with a metal strip that makes a sharp, clicking
sound when pushed and released. When trainers use traditional training methods
on an animal, they attempt to praise the dog when it does exactly what they
want, when they want it. This method is too slow when trying to mark a behavior, and sometimes, physical punishment is used.
The clicking sound is faster than saying "Good dog!"
and allows the trainer to mark with great precision the exact behavior for which the dog is being reinforced without the
use of physical punishment. Paired with something the animal finds very
reinforcing, food or a pat, the clicker becomes a powerful tool for shaping behavior.
The
neat thing about clicker training is that you can use it on any animal, not
just dogs, of any age, to teach desired behaviors. Here
is an example. We have an 11-year-old Cocker Spaniel named Tootles. I was
concern that Tootles’ jumping on and off the bed was becoming too hard on her
joints. So, for Christmas, I bought Tootles a set of
stairs to climb up onto the bed. The problem was that Tootles wanted to
keep jumping straight up from the floor and jump straight down. I first had to
teach Tootles that going to the stairs was rewarding. When she would
approach the stairs, I would click and treat. Next, when this behavior was learned, she would be rewarded for actually
touched the stairs. I continued this until she learned that going up, and down,
the stairs was rewarding and the way to go.
I am
not saying that clicker training is easy. It takes extra time and patience
on your part. But when you consider that your pet is going to be with you
for several years, the good behavior you get from
clicker training is well worth the time and effort it takes to train
them. If you are interested in finding out more about clicker training,
you can visit the web sites www.clickertraining.com or www.clickersolutions.com. The
original book on clicker training is Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen
Pryor. Remember, good dog training is not expensive…it is priceless.
Copyright © 2002, Eamon Patrick Riley. Dogmanusmc@aol.com. All
rights reserved. Mr. Riley is a
certified Master Trainer and associated with The Dog Man Training Company. He is also a member of the Association of
Canine Behavior Counselors,
Association of Pet Dog Trainers #5843, and the Animal Behavioral
Society.
