Clicker-Train Your Dog: Tricks of the Trade
Joanne M. Friedman, MD
So you say your favorite couch pooch is something less than an enthralling companion? Is he beginning to rival your spouse for overall lack of motivation? It could be time for you to introduce him to the next best thing in doggie education.
Clicker training is based on the classical and operant condition stimulus-response patterns discovered and categorized by Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, respectively. Pavlov is known for having caused his dog to drool by connecting the sound of a bell with feeding time. Eventually the bell tone alone would result in the copious dribbling that all dog owners know accompanies the sound of the electric can opener. Skinner, on the other hand, focused on getting small animals to perform tasks in order to earn a food reward. He had lots of mice and chickens pressing, clicking and nosing at targets so that food would be released into a dish. This may be news to you, but if you've had to put child-proof latches on the kitchen cabinets to keep your hound from creating his own cookie buffet, it should be obvious that he already knows all about it.
You can buy a clicker and instructions for using it at bookstores, in pet stores and online. Getting the clicker and learning to use it is half the battle. The majority of your efforts must be given over to task analysis. What is it you want your dog (or spouse, since he's sitting there doing nothing anyway) to do, and what are the steps required to get from here to there?
Of course you could go with the traditional dog tricks. "Sit!", "Stay!", "Shake Hands!", and "Get off my couch!" lend themselves easily to clicker training. You find a way to get him to perform the desired behavior (eg: push his hind end down, tie him to a chair, grab his paw, throw a "boogey can"). As soon as he's done that or something approximating it (for husbands, "Wash the dishes" might look more like "grab a beer" at first), you quickly click your magic clicker and fork over a cookie. What ho! You'll be amazed at the amount of attention you'll get. Focus is not an issue once the pattern is learned.
But anyone can do the simple stuff. Why not go for something more intriguing? A collie/husky mix I once knew and loved learned to find her favorite toy and put it to bed. We also dabbled in "skijoring"-being towed along on cross-country skis by your favorite canine companion is a wonderful bonding experience and far less aerobic than actually moving your own weight-but that was pre-clicker. I'd bet that with the clicker she'd have been blazing trails and finding me hot cocoa as well.
I'm more experienced in clicker-training horses, and on that basis I need to share a warning: be careful what you teach. Teaching my most assertive horse to pick up a baseball cap sounded like a great idea at the time. When he started removing hats from heads and not bothering to leave the hair and scalp behind, the humor was overshadowed by the screams and howls of his targets. Choose tricks that are harmless, not just in their initial incarnation, but extrapolated forward by your dog's enthusiastic brain to their logical excess. Teach him to hide the remote from your spouse, but recognize that he may also hide your car keys and anything else that vaguely resembles the original target. Teach him to bring you a Kleenex, but be aware that your frilly undergarments look awfully similar. Putting his stuffed toy in the toy box is great as long as it's not a real fur toy that might feel a lot like your new kitten.
Perhaps the best off-shoot of clicker work is that once you learn the technique you can apply it under all sorts of circumstances to encourage or discourage all sorts of behaviors. If you want your husband to buy you that new car, however, you're going to need a much bigger clicker and some really serious treats.
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