What Is Dog Clicker Training

If you are considering training your dog you should know about the ‘dog clicker training’ method, which has recently become popular among people who train dogs all over the country.    In this method the trainer uses a clicker, a small plastic box with a metal button that makes a distinctive click sound once the button has been pressed.

The training method is simple and it is quite similar to the positive training method. This is what you must do. Decide on a certain behavior that you want to reinforce or teach your dog to have. Things like sitting, eating, standing, barking, etc. come naturally to the dog. These need only be reinforced so that your dog knows when you would like it to do what.

Various other actions such as acting dead, shaking hands, rolling over,are not inborn actions in the dog and need to be taught.

You can use clicker training to do both.

Clicker training works according to the basic principles of operant conditioning, by associating the sound of the clicker with some food which the dog particularly enjoys.

Now all you have to do is to use the clicker to command the dog to do something, the dog, as he associates the sound of the clicker with the food, immediately does as it is told and the training is complete.

Let us take an example to explain thedog clicker training better, imagine you want to teach your dog to sit, you put a cookie on your dog’s nose playfully and then move it upwards, the dog will obviously follow the movement of the biscuit with its nose and will then naturally rest its posterior on the ground, and by doing that it will put itself in a sitting position.

You must time your clicking to be so accurate as to occur right as the dog seats, and then give it the cookie and praise it.

Continue doing this for some time until the dog begins to associate the clicking with the food until the click makes your dog sit without your luring it with treats.

Now teach him/her some other behavior, remembering to attach the clicking cue only once the animal himself offers you the behavior you expect, otherwise the clicking will not be naturally associated with any particular behavior and the dog may get confused regarding what it means.

Your dog is a smart little animal and it’s time you gave him/her due credit for that.

A number of trainers have been known to use negative reinforcement techniques together with the clicker method but this simply doesn’t work because punishment always creates many cases of unwanted behavior even if it serves the primary purpose of teaching the dog not to do something for some time.

Any sort of training is a tiring and rigorous process and needs time as well as patience.

Even though dog clicker training method has a high success rate it might not work for certain kinds of dogs, if you see that it’s not working for your pet you would be well advised to use some other technique to teach it tricks.