Dog Clicker Training Tricks

Prerequisite

• Before training your dog to do tricks, your pet will need to have basic obedience skills. Your dog needs to know sit, down, stay, come and other simple commands before learning more complex tricks. Most training builds on these basic commands. When you begin trick training, choose an environment with few distractions for your lessons. To hold your dog's attention, keep training sessions short and keep training simple. You will break each trick down into small steps, rewarding along the way as you work step by step to teach more complex tricks.

Method

• Clicker training is a type of positive reinforcement teaching. This means that you give your dog rewards when he does what you want him to do. Rewards can come in the form of positive words, hugs, toys or treats; during clicker training, it's easy to use small treats. During training, you'll hold the clicker, which is a small plastic box with a button that you push to make a clicking sound. At the exact moment your dog performs the behavior you want from him, click. The sound of the click "marks" the right behavior for your dog, after which you will give him a tiny food reward. Never punish your dog, yell at your dog or scold him for not performing.

Preparation

• It is best to train your dog a few hours after she has eaten. Most dogs aren't that interested in being rewarded with treats if they're working on a full stomach. Before beginning to teach tricks, you must teach your dog what the clicker means. Basically, you're going to click and give your dog a treat, click and give a treat, click and give a treat. You're going to do this in a few short sessions over the first few days of your training. That's the extent of your training for the first few days. This step is often referred to as "charging the clicker." It won't take long before your dog begins to associate the "click" with the treat and realize that the noise of the clicker means that something good is about to happen.

Practice

• Clicker training in actual practice teaches one small step at a time, with the dog receiving a click and reward for each part of the task, building up to the full trick. For example, if you were teaching your dog to shake hands, you would begin training him to do the trick by reaching for his paw and holding it for a few seconds. Each time you do this, you would click and give a treat. Next, you would wait until your dog offers his paw to click and give the treat. Over several sessions of clicking and treating, you would then introduce the command "shake" and reward the dog for offering his paw upon your command. With clicker training, once the dog understands the verbal command and the behavior that is to follow it, you begin phasing out the use of the clicker and treat.

Potential

• Some simple tricks you can teach your dog with clicker training include barking on command, begging, bowing, kissing, shaking hands, waving and yawning. More complex tricks include doing a figure 8, playing dead, rolling over, fetching the newspaper, finding the remote control and even riding a skateboard. Breaking the trick down into small, achievable steps, and clicking and treating for each small step on the way to the eventual behavior, will help you and your dog reach your goal of the desired trick.