Doggy Mentor

  If you are willing to train your dog you should know about the ‘dog clicker training’ method, which has recently become popular amongst dog trainers all over the world.   In this method the trainer uses a clicker, a tiny plastic box with a metal button that makes a distinctive click sound once the button has been pressed.

The training method is not only simple but also quite similar to the positive training method. This is how you can make it work. Decide on a certain action that you want to reinforce or teach your dog to do. Things like sitting, eating, standing, barking, etc. are natural behaviour in the dog. These need only be reinforced so that your dog knows when you want it to do them.

Various other actions like acting dead, shaking hands, rolling over, do not come naturally to 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, given that he associates the sound of the clicker with the reward, immediately obliges and the training occurs.

Let us take an example to explain the clicker method to train dogs better, suppose 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 floor, and by doing that it will put itself in a sitting position.

Perfect timing is crucial so that your clicking takes place exactly at the same time the dog seats; then give him/her the biscuit and praise him/her.

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 him/her with treats.

Now teach him/her some other behavior, remembering to attach the clicking cue only once the animal himself produces the behavior you expect, otherwise the clicking will not be naturally associated with anything in the dog’s head and it will be confused as to what it means.

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

Although s number of trainers have been known to use negative reinforcement techniques together with the clicker method, this simply does not work because punishment at all times creates a number of cases of unwanted behavior even if it serves the primary purpose of teaching the dog not to do something for a period of time.

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

Although 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.

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