People call many behaviors aggression, and talk about "treating" aggression as if it were a medical entity, like a staph infection. It's as if any display of symptoms confirms the existence of a full-blown case for which known treatments exist.
Dogs
What Can You Do with a Dog in Five Minutes?
By Karen Pryor on 02/01/2001A New Year begins your orders are flooding the website and making the phones ring clicker training is on the rise. At the end of January I taped a spot for WNBC Nightly News in New York (local New York news, not national). They wanted to do something on clicker training. I arranged to give a clicker "in-service" training at the Brooklyn animal shelter, to a bunch of eager young animal control officers with some hilariously off-the-wall half-grown dogs. The staff watched me click the first dog or two, then grabbed their clickers and soon were clicking dogs effectively right and left.
A Word about "Compulsion"
By Morgan Spector on 01/01/2001From 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:
The "Drop in Motion"
By Morgan Spector on 01/01/2001From Chapter 3 of Clicker Training for Obedience. While this is primarily useful for the obedience exhibitor, it is an invaluable safety net for the pet owner as well.
One of the biggest bugaboos in competition obedience training is the drop on recall....How do you get the dog to be alert to drop without losing speed on the recall? How do you keep speed on the recall without losing the drop? It is the stuff of which murky legends, rumor, and innuendo are made. One top handler is reputed to hit his dog with his hat. Some handlers use a throw chain. Some now advocate using an electronic collar. The grain of reality in all this is that the drop on recall is probably the most common cause of failure in the Open A ring.
Welcome to a New Year
By Karen Pryor on 01/01/2001Something tells me it's going to be a big year for clicker training.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of doubters out there, especially in the dog performance world. You've probably heard them. "Well, clicker's fine for pets or tricks, but if you really need reliability, you've gotta get tough."
