There are many styles of clickers to suit whatever works best for you! My girl personally uses one like the black one in the top left corner.
If you close your eyes and picture a dog trainer, you’re probably imagining someone with a treat pouch around their waist and a clicker in their hand. Perhaps the presence of the treat pouch makes sense, but why is the clicker so strongly associated with dog training? Clicker training has actually grown in popularity as method for teaching dogs what people want from them. The clicker works on a principle of positive reinforcement in order to teach a dog a new behavior. My training involves using a clicker quite a bit, since my girl is constantly teaching me new commands and concepts, and the clicker has become one of our most valuable tools for communicating with one another when my girl is trying to teach me something new.
Actually, my girl was originally against clickers, as strange as that sounds. It’s not like she was indifferent towards them or just didn’t happen to use them: my girl was actively against them, and this was only because she believed they didn’t work in the long run, not because it worked off pain or discomfort (like other training tools do). This is such a classic example of how you can often judge or dislike something before you actually become informed about it.
After my girl adopted me, she realized that she was going to need to teach me some complex behaviors but wasn’t sure how to go about doing that with the level of precision that was required. Her research led her to clickers and how beneficial they can be as an aid to training. It complements her aversive-free training style very well, and it has opened more training “doors” for her than she had before.
The clicker has proven its value over and over again in my training with my girl. A click captures a behavior faster than any other kind of reward. This is super helpful for quick or subtle behaviors, like the flick of an ear, and it has been super helpful for fine-tuning the behaviors I’ve needed to learn as a service dog. As another benefit, the meaning of a click is always clear: click = reward. This sound never varies, so a dog learns to associate that exact sound with a reward. The meaning of the click is always clear because its sound is consistent. On the other hand, a human voice ranges on any day due to emotions, environment, and weather, among other factors, so it’s impossible for people to make the exact same noise every single time when training a dog.
We dogs, though, don’t naturally associate the sound of a click with a reward, so if you want to use a clicker in your training, you first need to help your pup associate the clicker’s sound with positive things. When my girl was first helping me with this, she would click and then immediately give me a treat, and she did this over and over again. There weren’t any commands: it was just click and treat, click and treat, click and treat. In this way, I associated the sound of the clicker with a reward. This helped my future training because I knew that whenever I heard the click, I’d get a reward, and so I knew that I’d done the right thing whenever I heard the click. Just remember that you always have to reward after you click, otherwise your pup will no longer associate the sound of the clicker with something important or rewarding.
Once your pup learns to associate a reward with the sound of the clicker, then you can incorporate the clicker into your training. If you’ve already taught your pup commands before introducing a clicker, then start by picking an easy command that your pup knows by heart. My girl chose “Sit” since I knew it very well and already understood what my girl wanted when she asked me to sit. To introduce the clicker, my girl would ask me to sit, and she clicked the clicker immediately when I sat and then give me a reward. We repeated this over and over again so that I understood that the click meant that I had done the correct behavior and was going to get a reward for that. This conditioning made me want to repeat the behavior so that I could get the reward again, and this set me up for when my girl would use a clicker to introduce new commands and concepts to me.
Which leads into the main perk of clicker training: using the clicker to encourage new behaviors in order to shape a new command or desirable behavior. Using a clicker in this manner is very similar to using it when you’re acclimatizing your pup to the clicker, but instead of saying the command and then clicking, you click from the start and then incorporate the command. Let’s use the “Sit” example again. If my girl were to teach me “Sit” for the first time, she would first lure me into the sit. As soon as my haunches hit the floor, she would click and give me a reward. This is almost exactly like learning “Sit” without a clicker, except that your pup should learn what you’re asking faster because the sound of the click “freezes” that moment in your pup’s mind and tells them the exact behavior you’re rewarding. Once your pup picks up the new command or behavior (i.e. understanding your command/hand signal), then you can start phasing out the clicker, since it’s not fully necessary past the learning stage (of course, the time you use a clicker for a given command/behavior will vary depending on what your ultimate goal is).
Clicker training has strengthened my bond with my girl and has increased our ability to understand each other. It’s helped me finesse certain behaviors (like learning medical alert) and has even strengthened behaviors I’d already learned by reinforcing exactly what my girl wants from me. It’s not the tool for every trainer or every pup, but it’s definitely a highly valuable tool that I highly recommend!
The Clicker Ring is coming out soon! Isn’t it neat? It’s so conveniently sized! And you can even customize it.
xoxo,
Kelsie Iris
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Kelsie Iris: Service Dog 