It’s no secret that small dogs are, well, smaller. We often place them in a category of their own, apart from larger dogs, but small dogs and large dogs are the same species, so the same concepts apply. There are some special considerations that we might make with small dogs since their size does sometimes put them at a disadvantage …
Terry Ryan is known for her pithy wisdom, patience, and signature classes that are creative, fun, and effective. Her training games help improve the performance of both canine and human students. Among these engaging training techniques is a playful yet purposeful game that exemplifies her training philosophy. The game, I Spy, is based on the children’s guessing game. It is …
So you’ve become a clicker trainer! Naturally you are very excited. You want other people around you to stop using punishment-based methods and start clicking. So you introduce the clicker at your dog club or high school or wherever you are using it. And guess what: people not only don’t change, they get mad at you.
Challenge: a hearing-impaired dog Do you care for a deaf dog? Have you ever had the opportunity to work with a deaf dog? I had not—until Blanca. In 2013, my friend Milena rescued a large, but skeletal, dog from an abandoned gas station and contacted me for some training help. The dog delivered 10 puppies the day after her rescue, …
A search-and-rescue start Sometimes trainers venture into uncharted training territory without realizing how novel or new it might be. I have been teaching a graduate course on animal training at Western Illinois University since 1995. One of the students in my very first class was a firefighter named Bill, who also trained search and rescue dogs. Throughout the semester, he …
What a difference a day makes You and your little four-legged bundle of joy arrive home. 24 hours later you begin to question your sanity, wondering what has happened to the furry little angel you fell in love with the day before. The honeymoon is over before it began! What you want is a puppy that loves everybody, comes immediately when you …
The controversial clicker Should we stop using a clicker? Is it really needed? A study by Chiandetti et al. published in November of 2016 in Applied Animal Behavior Science has raised many questions about the efficacy of the clicker. The study, titled “Can clicker training facilitate conditioning in dogs?” looks at the differences among the use of a clicker, the use of a word as a marker, and …
Luring is legal Let me start by saying that if you decide to use a food lure, you are NOT committing a “training felony,” and the “’lure police” will not be knocking on your door. I would choose lure-and-reward training over any training involving aversives. That said—is luring the most efficient training? I’ll make my case that it is not. Luring = …
Training troubles We all have “off” days when a training session isn’t going as well as we had hoped. Perhaps the dog is distracted, unfocused, or simply wanders off. Maybe the dog just stands there staring or barking at you instead of offering behavior. If your dog has been making progress in a training session and you start noticing a displacement behavior, such as yawning, …
Picture the possibilities Imagine teaching your dog to put his hind feet—just his hind feet—on a mat. Or, imagine teaching your cat to give a high-five. What if you could teach your dog to use his nose to ring a bell to go outside? These fun and useful behaviors are all examples of targeting a body part to a specific …
The quest for greatness One characteristic of a good shaper is flexibility—a willingness to change course based on new information coming in. Good science shares that characteristic. As Susan Friedman once said, “A fact is only a fact until it’s replaced by a better one.” I love this pithy reminder that although something may seem obvious or indisputable, rather than …
Free shape—or not? Free shaping is a type of animal training where you teach the behaviors in gradual steps using a marker, like a clicker, and rewards. Shaping can be a great way to teach some difficult behaviors, expand your animal’s capabilities, exercise your animal’s brain, and build your chops as a trainer. There has been a recent trend pushing toward free shaping as …
