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| Source: leerburg |
The basics of clicker training are fairly simple, the most important aspects are timing the click correctly and the frequency of the clicks. The clicks must also be paired with a small treat.
Here's a simple list of the steps involved in using a clicker;
1. Grab your dog, clicker and a bag of small sized treats (small treats are best because they don't take your dogs attention away from the task being learned.)
2. You'll need to click every time your dog performs an action which is deemed as good. You must time it well, as soon as you see a desired action, click immediately.
3. You must be generous with your clicks, you don't need to see your dog perform the entire action your asking for the first time, but anything that could attribute to what you're ultimately trying to get at is good a should get a click.
4. After you have clicked once or a couple of times, you'll need to treat your dog. This ultimately teaches your dog that the click means "good" and also tells them they are going to be receiving a treat.
5. Remember that the frequency of your clicks is important. What I mean by that is you need to try to randomize how many clicks it takes for your dog to receive a treat. You can eventually make this less and less, however you always need to treat if you have clicked.
Here's an example to help you visualize how a dog learns. Imagine you were trying to teach a person to walk towards you, only using a clicker to guide them, no vocal or other signals were aloud. You would probably click every time they looked in your direction, right? And then you would probably click every time they looked in your direction and moved towards you. This is exactly how you train your dog with the clicker.
Another good tip is to imagine you were a dog, only hearing a click to guide you, it would be difficult and you would definitely need your teaching to have sufficient timing so that it's clear what you did well.
Charging the clicker before use
This is very important, before you start to train with a clicker you must first pair the sound of the clicker with a positive stimulus, like treats and praise. Make it something your dog loves, this will improve their drive to learn and get the treat!
To charge the clicker you'll need to do several training sessions with your dog in which you just click, and treat, and again click and treat. Do this about 20 times per session, and do a few sessions over to increase how highly your dog values the click, strengthening the pairing between it and the positive, the treat.
Teach your dog how to nod "yes" with clicker training
Follow this list of steps clicking and treating for each step until the behavior has been taught. Break it down into several sessions and try to accomplish 1-3 steps each session;
1. Say command, move hand with treat down past dogs face so dog looks down.
2. Dog looks down, eye movement only.
3. Dog looks down and moves head down.
4. Nose moves farther down.
5. Bring hand down and back up with treat past the face so dog looks up.
6. Dog looks down and back up.
7. Dog looks down and back up more quickly, more defined.
8. Bring hand down, up, down, up.
9. Dog looks down and up once.
10. Dog looks down and up twice.
11. Dog moves whole head up and down.
12. Dog repeatedly moves down and up.
Hope this comes in handy for some of you trainers out there. I'll be doing some more clicker tips and training schemes later in another article.
Happy Training.
