Clickers
Visit your local dog club these days and you are very likely to hear the sound of people clicking and seeing a lot of happy dogs! Militaristic training drill, choke chains and shouting are very much a thing of the past. In its place, the prospect of happy motivational training, led by the arrival and practice of clicker training from America - is one of the most simple, sympathetic and successful methods of animal training. It was developed by Karen Pryor, a famous dolphin trainer and learning consultant to NASA, and is based on the use of positive reinforcement. In fact, clicker training for dogs represents very well the art and science of training any animal or person using a conditioned rein forcer. Clicker training gives owners an invaluable insight and understanding into how their dog learns and is a marvelous and fun way of focusing a dog's attention on his owner/trainer as well as focusing the owner/trainer on his or her dog's reactions and responses. Clicker training can be used for all aspects of training right from teaching a 6-week-old puppy to sit, to teaching tricks, walking on a loose lead, competitive obedience, agility, working trials and even behavior modification and rehabilitation of an aggressive or nervous dog.
The usual commercially available 'clicker' is a small coloured plastic box containing a strip of flexible metal which makes a double click sound when depressed and released with the thumb. Initially the clicker produces a sound which is meaningless to the dog but, conditioned correctly, he will quickly associate the sound with something rewarding and so the clicker becomes an audible conditioned rein forcer - a signal of success. The click is so quick that it marks the correct behavior at the split second it is offered or performed by the dog, thus telling the dog exactly what he did to earn the reward. The clicker is a Pavlovian signal of reward, so as soon as the dog hears the click he knows that his efforts have been successful. The click boosts his ego in much the same way as a tick on a piece of homework boosts ours. Emotionally it gives the dog instant feelings of pleasure because dopamine, the neurotransmitter chemical associated with well being is released as a pulse in the brain each time he hears the click.
After only a few repetitions of 'click and treat' the dog will focus completely on the owner and work hard in an attempt to make the owner click again. In effect the dog, by altering or shaping (improving) his own behavior, tries to train the owner to make the rewarding click - an interesting role reversal to traditional training techniques where the trainer is encouraging the animal to perform new behaviors.
While the dog is being taught a behavior he is initially given rewards for every attempt (fixed schedule of reinforcement), but once he has grasped the exercise, the reward is given on a random basis i.e. he sometimes has to perform the behavior twice for a reward sometimes three times, others just once. This variable schedule of reinforcement strengthens the dog's response as the loss of an expected reward induces frustration in him, frustration increases vigour in trying harder to earn his reward. The clicker trained dog is able to resolve his frustration, and he will remain calm, happy and confident while trying to earn his reward.