Karen Pryor Clicker Training Library

Editor's note:

On a working farm in the English countryside, nearly a mile from the nearest road, people and dogs come together from all over the world to learn from one of the world's top trainers, Kay Laurence. Kay has been teaching, writing, and training dogs from her UK-based home and farm for more than 35 years. What she teaches is far more than just training skills. Her philosophy, developed from her years of living with and observing dogs, is that that we should give dogs equal consideration and try view the world from the dog's perspective. Only then can we achieve a relationship with dogs based on connection and pleasure.

Click and create

One subject that crops up frequently in training circles is the side effects of various training techniques. We caution against the harmful fallout of punishment-based methods. We debate the relative merits of luring, shaping, and capturing. We examine studies that compare the rate of behavior acquisition using various marker signals. And, of course, we love to talk about the added benefits of clicker training—engaging the dog's mind, the respondent conditioning of a positive emotional state, the fostering of creativity in both trainer and trainee.

101 Things to do with a Box: A Good Exercise for an Older, Suspicious, or Previously Trained Dog

This training game is derived from a dolphin research project in which I and others participated, "The creative porpoise: training for novel behavior," published in the Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior in 1969. It has become a favorite with dog trainers. It's especially good for "crossover" dogs with a long history of correction-based training, since it encourages mental and physical flexibility and gives the dog courage to try something on its own.

Editor’s note:

Times are changing

For many people, the idea of a muzzle evokes a long-standing association with aggressive dogs. That impression can create feelings of fear and worry when people hear about or witness a dog in a muzzle. There is no denying that when many people see a muzzled dog, they envision the likes of a Hannibal Lecter character (a monster, but in fur)!

Dogs smile. Just like people, dogs pull the corners of their mouths up high toward their eyes, partially open their mouths, and smile. In 1872, Darwin wrote of the universality of facial expressions in The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals. Roughly 130 years later, Dr. Patricia McConnell authored For the Love of a Dog in which she compared human and dog facial expressions using the methods developed by Paul Ekman, the world's leading scientist on the topic. The truth is out: dogs smile, and, of course, experience emotions.

Stationary behavior: What are we really looking for?

Recently, I watched a man working on duration of a behavior—his dog's front feet, stationary, on a target. Watching his training session, I did not see anything out of the ordinary. But there was a problem. The trainer said he had achieved 5-7 seconds of duration, yet when the class instructor asked for a demonstration, he could only demonstrate the barest fraction of a second of standing still on the target.