CLICKER TRAINING PART 3

For more advanced behaviors you may need to slowly work up to the cue point. For example, if you want to teach your dog to turn in a circle, you may need to start with only the turn of the head.

If your little one is sitting facing you, click for even the slightest movement to the side. This could be him/her looking over his/her shoulder, turning his/her foot to the side, or just his/her eyes glancing to side. Watch your pet very carefully to make sure you don’t miss these slight movements. Click and treat for even the smallest glance.

You will want to up the stakes slowly, and increase what your dog must do to earn the click. Once your pup is reliably looking over their shoulder with every click, withhold the clock and wait for them to offer a little more for the next click. This little more may be as small a difference as the degree to which they turn their head. Do not require too big a change, or you may have to step back and start again. The key is very small baby steps. The smaller you can break things down, the better. If you have successfully broken down the steps to the desired behavior your dog will have it figured out within a few training sessions.

Another example would be teaching the “place” command. The place command is very useful as it teaches your dog to go to a particular place and wait there until released. This is excellent if you have guests over, or if you are working with something you don’t want your dog to get into.

Choose a place in the room, or on a particular item – like a bath mat, dog bed, or small rug. At first you will want to click and treat any time your dog looks towards that place or item. Once reliably looking in the right direction, begin to click every time he/she takes even one step towards the mat. The next step might be having to take two or three steps towards the place you have in mind. Then start clicking and treating for four or five steps in the right direction. Up the stakes even further by requiring him/her to actually touch the mat, whether with a paw, or a nose, a touch is a touch. Eventually only click when you have two feet on the mat, then three free, then all four feet. After several training sessions start requiring a sit on the mat, or a down on the mat. Once you have this reliably, then start adding the cue. So “mat”, “bed”, or “place” means go to that item (or place) and lay down. To make things even more complex, start delaying the click, so that “place” also means stay there. Start by waiting only one or two seconds after the down, and slowly work up to waiting ten seconds before the click.

You can really train very complex behaviors very easily using the clicker, which is one of the reason’s it’s such a fantastic way to train Service Dogs. Advanced tasks, such as making a bed, doing the laundry, or getting a bottle a bottle of water out of the fridge can all be trained using the same method. Break things down into very small steps and you will be successful every time.