How do you train? Tell me everything you think/know/do.

Jason L

spiritdogs

First of all, I don't know why you would deliberately choose to be so forceful with the dog if you didn't have to be.  I could understand it, even if I didn't agree with it, had you said that you tried it the other way and failed.  But, as an initial attempt, what would have been wrong with simply teaching it using the back-chaining?  Why are people so afraid to try to teach positively, and why is there such a lingering, yet false, belief that positively trained dogs don't understand the concept of having to perform a behavior accurately and on cue.  The only difference is between forcing the dog to do it to avoid unpleasantness, or creating a situation where the dog really wants to do it because he might earn something he wants (which does not imply having to use food, tug, toy, or even a verbal acknowledgement, for every single repetition!!!!).

It really just depends of the dog. I'm not saying that this is the way to teach hold/retrieve for every dog. Actually, for most dogs the clicker retrieve is the best way to go. But then again - this goes back to an earlier part of this discussion - what's a lot of pressure to one dog is nothing to the other dog; how one dog reacts to correction is different than how another reacts.

As for why I would deliberately choose to be forceful with a dog when I don't have to be ... well, that probably deserves a new thread for discussion. I'll just say that I think it's not the end of the world to make your dog do a few "HAVE TO"s from time to time. As long as the relationship is good and the bond is strong, an occasional conflict is not the end of the world. In fact, used appropriately, conflict can function as a very valuable teaching tool.

I guess we can agree to disagree.  I do think it is the end of the world, and consider it a training failure when I have to resort to physically forcing a dog to do something that I could have taught him to do with other means.  And, I have found that when I operate under that premise, it becomes more of a training imperative to find something other than force that works just as well, if not better.  You are correct that occasional conflict is not the end of the world.  I have certainly had instances where I resorted to a loud interruption (to break up a tiff, for example), but I think that dogs trained exclusively with physical force are much less likely to have the kind of resilient relationship that you expressed.  Oddly, they often also have humans who recognize none of the signs that their dog is not thrilled to death with them.  Not saying that applies to anyone here, but all of us can certainly benefit from recognizing when our desire for perfection overrides our dogs' sense of safety and well being.

corvus

When I was "training with a clicker" it was just a marker. My reward rate wasn't high and I tried to give my dog lots of help. I still used a lot of interruptors and conditioned punishers. It wasn't until I stopped doing that that I realised how many opportunities to reward good behaviour I had missed. It was quite liberating ditching the conditioned punishers.

 The clicker is a marker. It sounds like the biggest issues you had in the past were that you were making a very typical novice training mistake - low rate of reinforcement and perhaps were "lumping" instead of breaking behaviors down and expecting that the dog knew what you wanted too early on. Improving your rate of reinforcement alone, clicker or no will give you much better results. 

 Re: my comment that Gary Wilkes was a clicker trainer when Karen Pryor liked him ;) He and Karen Pyror used to go all over with their seminars on "Clicker Training Dogs" and really they were the first major players in getting clicker training to the dog community. It is a bit ironic to me that Wilkes is now not considered a "real" clicker trainer by many.

 Liesje -  People feel that if you aren't exclusively using clicker training in your training program you are not really a clicker trainer. That is what is meant by the "Clicker Trainer vs Clicker User" comments. I think of this as "Clicker Extremism" and have never seen any reason to believe it is true. If you do a lot of free shaping with your dog, especially if you start in puppyhood and are a skilled enough trainer to have a high rate of reinforcement and teach your dog to work through stress, you will have a dog who is very good at shaping. Even if you tell them no, even if they sometimes are corrected for things in every day life or or even if they wear prong collars for walks or even if they wear bark collars when they go outside. On the flipside, if never correct your dog, use "only positive" training (and I think everyone knows what I mean) but use only lure/reward training and never teach your dog to work through stress, you will have a dog who is very poor at shaping. The argument that using correction "ruins" dogs for clicker training is, to my knowledge unfounded. Like any other method, the success of clicker training will vary depending on the skill of the trainer.