Dog Training: Clickers

Using Clickers 

Training your pet to do tricks requires many things.  Some of these aspects include strategy, rewards, and copious amounts of patience.  Strategies vary and require some testing to determine which ones your dog responds best to.  However, they can be vital in teaching your dog to complete tricks.
My dog, Sadie, is very hyper and her attention can only be held for small amounts of time at once.  She gets excited very easily, but is very smart, making teaching of tricks complicated.  Methods can be used to channel her focus into learning the tricks, and I wanted to try a new one.

One of these many methods is using a clicker.  Clickers are devices that fit within your hand and when pressed makes a click-click sound (Sundance 32). Often, clickers can be used to train dogs instead of trainers' using their voices because it's a more clear and consistent sound. 

For this post I chose to use the clicker method to teach my dog a trick, in addition to treats.  The clicker definitely helped tell my dog when she had completed the trick, therefore creating more clear instruction on my part.  Even though I got frustrated the clicker helped maintain my dogs focus and kept it from being clouded by my emotions.  This is mentioned in the book: "A clicker separates the reward marker from any frustration, anger or other emotion in your voice.  It allows the dog to focus on what he is doing, rather than worrying about how your mood is changing," (Sundance 32)  This piece of evidence is what made me pick this method to try out. I think this is one of the best advantages of using a clicker because it keeps my dog from thinking I'm mad at her when I get frustrated.  However, I did notice that although she responded well to this method, it still took a long time and multiple tries for her to understand what she was doing.  Therefore I think this isn't truly the best method in for her. At first she was confused on what the clicker was, but I introduced what it meant, and after a little while, she started to understand.

Overall, I think this method is useful, but not by itself.  It's a difficult strategy to navigate and although it helped my dog, it needed a good amount of help from verbal commands and treats. In addition, the clicker was hard to hold when I was trying to demonstrate the trick. This experience helped my dog improve her listening skills and learn a skill faster than if we tried the trick without the clicker.  This section of reading in my book showed me how to appropriately and effectively use the clicker and how it would help me and my training with my dog.

The trick I used for this was spinning, where my dog would spin around and sit on command.  What tricks have you taught, or tried to teach your dog?  Did you get frustrated while teaching?

Sundance, Kyra. The Dog Tricks and Training Workbook: a Step-by-Step Interactive Curriculum to Engage, Challenge, and Bond with Your Dog. Quayside Pub. Group, 2009.