bite me
I was walking through Chelsea last night, and wound up strolling alongside a woman with a golden retriever. It seemed like a nice-enough dog. The woman, however…
She was using clicker training — you click a clicker twice to get your dog’s attention and keep it focused, not distracted by things — and at first, I was fine with it. But as we were walking along, she was using it every two seconds. “Click-click!” “Click-click!” “Click-click!” She would use it when the dog stopped to sniff the ground, for heaven’s sake — at that point, I almost turned around and said, “It’s a dog! Dogs sniff the ground! That’s what they do! Let the dog do what it does!”
If I were the dog, honestly, I would have bitten her. “Click this, woman!” : chomp! :
Categorized as New York, New York
When you’re “shaping” a behavior with a clicker, a “high rate of reinforcement” is good because it keeps the dog completely focused on whatever behavior you’re going for. The clicker isn’t used all the time — in fact, once you’ve got the behavior down, you don’t need it anymore unless you’re trying to apply it to some new situation where the dog might be distracted. But say this woman was training her dog to heel or walk on a loose leash; she would want to click and treat frequently as she kept adjusting the dog’s behavior. Millions of people clicker train, but you don’t see a clicker in people’s hands all the time because you don’t need it all the time. When you do, then, it’s better to be liberal with it.