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Clicker Training for Obedience

Staying Positive in a Reality Show World

Editor’s note: Premises for reality shows seem to be unlimited these days, so it came as no surprise when reality television went to the dogs. Greatest American Dog, which debuted on CBS in July 2008, featured twelve extraordinary teams of dogs and owners from across the nation, living together and competing against each another to determine who had the best-trained dog. Each week, the dog-owner teams competed in different training challenges, and each week a panel of three judges voted one team off. The last team standing earned the title of “Greatest American Dog” and $250,000.

 

Podcast: How to Put An End to Counter-Surfing

Listen to Aidan's podcast (available at the bottom of the page) to find out more about How to Put An End to Counter-Surfing. Read the original article here.

Who Started Clicker Training for Dogs?

A question was posed on the ClickerExpo Yahoo Group e-mail list recently: "Who started clicker training for dogs?" Here, Morgan Spector supplies the answer.

How to Train Scent Discrimination for Obedience Competition

Scent discrimination is one of the "advanced" obedience exercises, but it is actually one of the easiest to train. Why? You are working with the dog's single most acute sense: smell. Although the word is politically charged, in behavioral terms "discrimination" simply means a choice made on the basis of established criteria. In the case of scent articles, that criterion is the handler's scent ("find the one that smells like me").

A Word about "Compulsion"

From Chapter 2 of Clicker Training for Obedience. Many trainers who dip their toes into the waters of operant conditioning still reserve for themselves the option of "making" the dog do an exercise at some point in the training process. The theory, expressed in different ways, boils down to the notion that "the dog must know that it doesn't have any choice but to obey when I give a command." In response, I pose two questions: