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Get the definitive answers to what is clicker training and frequently asked questions about the method.

I used to think of myself as standing perpetually on a bridge, with a foot in each camp. I used to expend a lot of time trying to talk psychologists into understanding or at least coming to watch what we were learning about the animals with their science. No luck. No luck in the other direction, either: the behavioral biologists were not much interested in training or reinforcement.

Barbara and I hypothesize that the clicker is a conditioned "joy" stimulus that is acquired and recognized through those same primitive pathways, which would help explain why it is so very different from, say, a human word, in its effect. If this is true, another contributing factor to the extraordinary rapidity with which the clicker and clicked behavior can be acquired might be that the click is processed by the CNS much faster than any word can be.

Clicker training involves shaping behavior in small steps, identifying the behavior, as it occurs, with some kind of marker signal. Dolphin trainers use a whistle; dog and horse trainers have settled on the clicker. But couldn't you just use a word, like 'good,' or 'yes,' as a marker signal?

What I am going to present to you is my own case study about my golden retriever, Benjamin. It was through Ben that I met Karen Pryor and, thus, found some of the most effective ways to deal with aggression and fear-based behavior in dogs.