Clicker Training - 059 Dog Leads

If you'd like help implementing anything I talk about today or any of the other episodes, you can email me at bishopsgatetraining@gmail.com. To set up clicker training, what you want to do is you want to take a neutral stimulus, which is just a fancy way of saying something that doesn't mean anything by itself.

So in this case, it would be the click.

A dog hears it, it's probably not gonna respond to it or react to it.

But we want to pair that with an unconditioned stimulus, which would be something they do want, such as food.

Every dog is motivated by food to some extent, so that's why we use it a lot in our training or the initial acquisition of a behavior.

How I pair those things together is I will literally just sit there, go click, treat, click, treat, click, treat, until they start to anticipate every time they hear that click, give them a treat.

You can give the treat before the click or at the same time as the click, but it really slows down the whole process, doesn't work as quickly.

You want a delayed conditioning, and that would be you click, treat comes afterwards, or it's delayed a little bit after the click.

And for the best pairing, you want to deliver that reinforcer within about a second.

Main thing we want to be careful of is what we call superstitious behavior.

So if you click, somebody drops a book in the other room, they may start to figure out, "Oh, every time I hear that click, something bad is gonna happen, something, you know, something is gonna startle me." So we want to keep those times short to make sure there's not any time for that superstitious behavior to take hold.

There's no time to be distracted by something.

Once we get that pairing, then we can start to de-delay the delivery of that reinforcer more and more.