Dogs

Morten Egtvedt and Cecilie Køste, two of the newest ClickerExpo faculty members, are a married training team from Norway. The pair were early adopters of clicker training and are Scandinavia's leading authors on this technology. Morten and Cecilie have been top European competitors in obedience, tracking, and agility. Their clicker training school focuses on using clicker training to win in competition; teachers and students from their school are not just top clicker trainers, but also top-notch competitors in European dog-related sports. Morten and Cecilie edit and publish a full-color magazine on dog training, and publish and sell Don't Shoot the Dog, as well as many other clicker titles in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish. Recently we spoke with Morten and Cecilie about their background and success.

In a business article I wrote for this website in 2005, I noted that clicker training needs to become popular with the mainstream, to be the people's choice. One of the central tenets of that proposition must be raising the goals that pet owners have for their relationships with their dogs. If pet owners are bogged down by what could be called a culture of obedience, they are saddled with low expectations for interactions with their pets. And, if they have low expectations, in most cases they don't need something special. "Any ole" training method can get a dog to perform a down.