A recently celebrated training event was a quickly organized one-day workshop for fifteen lucky clicker trainers, taught by British clicker teacher Kay Laurence. Mary Ann Callahan did an incredible job of pulling a workshop together on short notice. (Kay made the trip to deliver my daughter Gale Pryor's new Border collie puppy, Pheobe. Gale saw the litter on our business trip to the UK in March and found the perfect apprentice for the now-elderly family Border collie Esme. Ezzie, who helped raise all three of Gale's little boys, has taken on her new charge with complete calm, treats her kindly but firmly, and really does teach the puppy what to do, an interesting sight.)
Gale and Phoebe and I and my poodle Misha participated in the workshop, a fascinating day, ranging from shaping steps for dancing with your dog, to a grand finale in which all of us learned a Scottish March with dogs included (and in Alexandra Kurland's case, with Panda the miniature Seeing-eye Horse included.)
We made interesting discoveries about how sloppy we are with our cues and cuing. We found out that our dogs are much better at learning and using cues than we usually are about teaching them!
Here's a little exercise Kay gave us that you might like to try. Take three people and one dog. Choose a behavior that's on a verbal cue that the dog knows well, such as a spin, or bow, or bark. Now: the first person switches the behavior over to a new verbal cue - 'Banana' is Kay's example. When that's done, the second person switches the behavior from 'Banana' to a hand gesture. Got that? When that's done, the third person switches the behavior over to the sight of an object, a coffee cup, say. Dogs can do it, no problem. People have a heck of a time.
This exercise actually has some very practical advantages; see Kay's article on performance jitters, i.e., behaviors breaking down in performance.
Karen Pryor is the founder and CEO of Karen Pryor Clicker Training and Karen Pryor Academy. She is the author of many books, including Don't Shoot the Dog and Reaching the Animal Mind. Learn more about Karen Pryor or read Karen's Letters online.
Post new comment