Adding the Cue: An Excerpt from Click for Joy

For two reasons: First, when the pup is learning the behavior, we want him to concentrate on the behavior. At that point, the cue is meaningless to him anyway—just another bit of "noise" to sort through. In the beginning, make learning easier on your dog by minimizing distractions, including meaningless cue words. Second, we want the cue to be associated with the final, perfect form of the behavior. If you add the cue in the beginning, you run the risk of having an unfinished version of the behavior crop up with you least want it to—like during the stress of competition—even though you continued to shape a more precise behavior.