TRAINING
WITH TEMPERAMENT THEORY
Clicker Training
by
Lisa Ochoa
Introduction and Acknowledgements
Training:
Training
Using Temperament Theory
Obedience and Temperament Theory
Agility and Temperament Theory
Herding and Temperament Theory: Action Dogs
The Temperament Theory and Rescue Work
Reference:
Bibliography
Glossary
Living
With Border Collies
Hug Therapy
United States
Border Collie Club
Border Collie Society of
America
Questions?
Comments?
Suggestions?
Tell us what you
think!
Okay, so what is clicker training?
In a nutshell: clicker training is the application of a conditioned reinforcer, signaling which behaviors will be rewarded. A conditioned reinforcer is an initially meaningless signal which has been paired with a primary reinforcer (i.e., something the dog will work for) to be associated with a reward. Though the training applications are fairly recent, the concept of pairing a behavior with a specific sound has been around for some time. Think of Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell, for example.
I've been using a clicker on my dogs for a number of years. At the time I got started in clicker training, I wasn't really looking for a new training method; I just wanted to change the life of one little whippet.
Nellie Princess is a rescue from a Texas puppy mill. I got her in 1995. At the time, she was one of the shiest and most introverted dogs I had ever seen. For the first few weeks in my house, she hid in her crate almost all the time, even with the door open. Gradually, she spent more time on the couch, and soon after she was unobtrusively following one step behind me wherever I went in the house. But she was very tense, and would not look at me, and seemed unable to learn even the simplest commands. Any attempt to teach her, using the gentlest and cheeriest methods, quickly resulted in a quivering ball of whippet.
Because of the surroundings in which she had been raised, Nell had no experience in learning anything, no self- confidence, and no trust in direct contact with people. She seemed almost autistic. At about the point at which I was ready to give up the idea of doing anything with her, I heard of clicker training and decided to give it a try. The results of this experiment were pretty impressive. Nellie is now a confident and outgoing dog; she's very popular wherever she goes, and she accepts the attention she receives with a regal calmness that still amazes me when I think of how she was when she first came to live with me.
Nellie's taught me a great deal that I have found useful in helping other dogs through their shyness or confidence problems, and she's also taught me a lot about using a clicker. I've used a clicker to teach her everything she knows, right down to such seemingly simple things as eating a complete meal or pottying while on leash. (In fact, about the only thing she DIDN'T learn from a clicker was how to sleep on the bed -- she thought that one up all by herself.) I've since successfully used the clicker to rehabilitate several other dogs with major behavioral problems, and I've also used it to some extent on all my other dogs in their training, and it has become one of the primary tools in my trainer's bag of tricks. Clicker training wasn't developed with abused or genetically Shy/Wary animals in mind, but its principles are especially suited for adaptation to working with these dogs. The clicker gives the trainer the power to reward the tiniest increments of desired behaviors, thereby increasing the number of rewards each dog can earn during a training session, which in turn increases the dog's confidence. My original goals in working with Nell were merely to get her to relax a little and respond to basic commands. Using a clicker, I discovered that I was able to not only quickly teach her to sit and walk on a leash, but I was also able to modify her personality. She became much more open, and her shyness turned into an appealing curiosity about the world surrounding her.
So what makes clicker training a good idea for you and your dogs? Why use this method? What can you gain that you didn't have before?
Well, first off you gain precision. Using a clicker, you can pinpoint the *exact* instant of the behavior you want. So, for example, if you have a dog who is petrified of everything in the world around it, you can click that exact first second of relaxation (the dog cannot remain in panic mode forever, one of the principles of the "See, it won't kill you!" method) to let your dog know that THAT is the behavior you are rewarding.
Shy/Wary dogs also like the sense that they have some control over the training session — it's their behavior that can cause the click, and in fact for some dogs the click itself can become more reinforcing than the treat that follows.
You'll find you won't need to use nearly as many corrections with this method. You'll need some, in my opinion, but the times and methods you'll need to correct your dog will be minuscule compared to more traditional training techniques.
Clicker training is also useful for "shaping" — creating a complex string of behaviors or an extended behavior pattern from small increments. You can literally teach a dog to behave confidently, starting with nothing more than a relaxation of expression in stressful surroundings.
Finally, clicker training is all about communication. You're communicating to your dog using the clicker, and the dog is communicating with you, trying to get you to make that magic clicker sound. It's a lot like learning to speak a foreign language; if you've ever spent any time trying to get a person who doesn't speak English to understand what you're trying to tell him, the moment when the dog gets what it is that you're trying to teach will be instantly familiar. For me, that little light bulb that goes off over the dog's head is a beautiful thing to see, and the dogs look pretty smug when they've succeeded in telling me that it's time for the click to happen.
To learn more about the principles of clicker training, I cannot recommend too highly that you read Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. All of the Gary Wilkes videos are excellent resources for seeing how clicker training is actually applied in real life.
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