The queen of clicker training, Karen Pryor, released her new book “Reaching the Aninal Mind” yesterday and the launch garnered her a spot on Good Morning America. Kudos Karen! If you missed the show you can watch it here. Karen demonstrated clicker training with a bouncy five-month-old Golden Retriever puppy who had been recently adopted by one of the show’s staff members. She worked with the puppy for ten minutes the day before and taught it a nose touch on her hand, explaining that this was a foundation behavior that could be used to get the pup to go wherever you would like without using force. She had the puppy jump onto the couch and then jump off (it was very good at jumping on her too!).
We are happy Karen got the exposure that she did for clicker training but we would have liked to have seen a clearer explanation as to how people can incorporate it into their everyday lives and all of the benefits that come with this method like the enriched bond it forms between human and canine, the speed with which animals learn, the safety of clicker training and the fact that you don’t always have to use food treats to reward the dog. The host even made a comment about all of the treats and the dog getting fat. In our opinion, this is one of the greatest obstacles for clicker training. People who don’t understand conditioned responses and the fact that you gradually eliminate your rewards when you use clicker training argue that the dog isn’t working for the person, they are just working for the food. It is important that people know they can use ANYTHING the animal wants or needs to make clicker training work for them and this point was not driven home. If you control the resources, you control the dog.
Could Karen have won over a lot of dominance-based trainers and people who love dog whispering by explaining that a clicker helps them control the resources in their dog’s life thus making the person important to the dog? We have found that when you use clicker training, you become the gateway to wonderful things which helps instil a great deal of respect between you and your dog. Hopefully this is just the beginning of clicker training’s journey into the mainstream and as we all get more practiced at speaking with the media we will be able to clearly get our key messages across and make an impact on the general dog owning public.
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June 17, 2009 at 10:15 am
Jane
Well, at least she got the exposure. I cannot imagine trying to convey clicker training to anyone in, what 5 minutes? Plus she was dealing with the dog at the same time. The guy asked good questions but they should have taken that darn clicker out of his hand!!!! He may have done more damage with his implied clicking as a a cue than she could repair!
I hope more people learn to understand clicking as a way to understand how incredibly intelligent animals are- so much more than we give them credit for with any “dominance theories”.
June 17, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Silvia
Well, Millan gets exposure also. A whole lot of exposure, unfortunately.
The segment left me wanting as well. Five minutes is indeed a short time, but I do wonder if it could have been orchestrated in a way that’d would keen the average dog owner’s interest to investigate more. Maybe I am wrong, but my hunch is that turned people off, rather than attracting them to it.
The host used the clicker wrong, and Pryor clicked for paws on the couch and off the couch and this and that, while the pup kept jumping up. That is exactly what the average dog owner does NOT want. They see each week on TV how a man controls a dog into calmness using NO treats. That is what people see and that is what many owners want. Seemingly throwing treats around for a behavior that most dog owners are unfamiliar with makes no sense to them, and five minutes is too short to explain why it makes sense. Professionals dedicated to positive reinforcement understand what Pryor did, but the average dog owner might have found it rather confusing. Maybe, had she used the clicker to teach the pup to sit so that America sees that one can get a calm and good behavior with a clicker better than with corrections, it might have caught the interest of owners that don’t want to correct but don’t know how else to get the behavior.
A missed opportunity to mainstream positive reinforcement and clicker training? I think so!
My hope is that there will be more opportunities.