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Now, Just Point and Click

Denise Flaim | Animal House

April 24, 2000

THIS SUMMER, Andrea Arden is going to chicken camp.

At the weeklong workshop on what bespectacled scientists call operant conditioning, "you have to train your chicken to do a particular thing by the end of the week," says Arden. And in teaching her clucker to differentiate between yellow and blue or use its beak to stretch out a rubber band, Arden-who in her day job trains dogs- will have to rely on the metallic chirps of a small, hand-held clicker.

It's a long way from chicken camp to your living room, but then again, maybe not.

"Clicker-training has been around for a long time," says Arden, owner of Manhattan Dog Training and author of "Dog Friendly Dog Training" (Howell, $17.95). "If you've ever been to an aquarium show, that's where it was originally used. You can't stick your head under the water and say, 'Good boy!' to a dolphin. But he can hear the clicker."

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Serious clicker trainers-such as semi-retired clicker gurus Marian and Bob Bailey of Hot Springs, Ark., who run the aforementioned workshops-like to bandy about terms like "operant conditioning" and "secondary reinforcers." But in everyday language, here's how this training method works: Every time the dog-or cat, or chicken, or pick- a-species-hears a click, it gets a reward-whether it's a piece of liver or a game of tug. Soon the click signals that impending reward to the animal. The trainer then strategically clicks to "mark" a particular behavior, and soon the animal is offering it unprompted, in order to provoke a click-and, subsequently, a treat.

Clicker trainers say their method is effective because it makes the animal a proactive part of its own training, and encourages it to think about what the trainer is asking for. Unlike a human voice, the click is unambiguous, sounding the same every time. Also, clicker devotees contend, teaching a dog, say, to sit this way-simply waiting for the dog to eventually sit and clicking just as those furry haunches are about to hit the floor-gives the dog "muscle memory" of what it's like to perform the action on its own, instead of having its head jerked up and its rear end pushed down, the methodology used in traditional "jerk and pull" training, in which the choke collar is the tool of choice.

Clickers are especially useful for "capturing" oddball behaviors- tail-chasing, yawning, stretching, sneezing-that a trainer would be hard-pressed to physically manipulate an animal into doing. Not to mention what such precise targeting does to improve a trainer's crucial sense of timing.

"I was blown away by what the clicker can do," says dog trainer Karen Miller of The Confident Canine in Manhattan. "I have learned more about how to change a dog's behavior with a clicker than in years of pushing them into position with traditional training."

Like many things, clicker-training's popularity has been accelerated by the Internet. (For the Web-literate, www.geocities.com/ Athens/Academy/8636/CTFAQ.html offers excellent links, and www.cattales.org/training.html is specific to cats.) Clicker- training books and videos, as well as the clickers themselves, are available at www.dogandcat books.com and www.sitstay.com.

Perhaps because of its wildfire popularity, clicker training has been labeled by some as faddish-though that's not necessarily a bad thing.

"It's a gizmo that has brought a lot of bad press to reward training," says Ian Dunbar, the California-based veterinarian, behaviorist and author who is largely credited with popularizing the idea of dog training using positive reinforcement instead of leash corrections. "But the good side of the fad is it has certainly revolutionized how people look to training dogs: You can train dogs much more quickly and effectively using reward-based training."

For his part, Dunbar doesn't usually rely on a clicker with his dogs, though he has used it on his horse. "When I'm training the dog around the house, I have a cup of tea in one hand and a bunch of papers in the other," he says. Instead of a clicker, "I use the words 'Good dog.' I want training to approximate real life."

In the end, says Arden, it doesn't matter what tool you use-be it a clicker or a whistle or a phrase-to tell your pet that a reward is coming. What matters is that you're giving a reward. Some owners and trainers, she says, are unwilling to let go of the belief that their pets should be motivated by sheer loyalty.

"Dogs are not created to please us," she says, and so should be motivated to do so with food and toys instead of leash jerks. "But it's hard to let go of old habits."