Wondered if some clicker training experts could give me some advice. After reading a few recent threads on clicker training I decided to give it a go. I thought i was doing it right by charging the clicker, did this for 2-3 days by clicking and treating if she sat with out a cue, or went down, cocked head etc. She seemed to understand that the click meant nice treat. Now she does know sit with a verbal cue and down but is very slow with doing this so my first aim was to get her to sit quickly. When i first started I used hand signals again so she would continue to understand that click meant treat, she sat straight away and i clicked and treated her. Problem is she doesnt seem to understand that she can work out what to do correctly herself. Once sat and had the treat she will conitnue to just sit there looking at me for more food. So because of this I started throwing the treat after i had clicked so she had to come out of position. This works sometimes if she can be bothered to go and get the treat or if it smells nice enough for her. If not she will just eventually flop down and relax (when she first did this i clicked and treated and she just ended up staying on the floor even when i had thrown the treat) looking like she cant be bothered! Originally i presumed she didnt move to get the treat because she has been taught leave it if food is dropped on the floor (kids!) and she is very good with this. But like I have said when i charged the clicker she would quite happily go and get it herself. She just doesnt seem that eager to try anything to get treats! She has quite a delicate stomach so treats consist of sandwhich ham/chicken, apples, carrots, cheese and hotdogs. I also hold her meals hoping that she will be hungry enough to want to participate but it doesnt seem to make much difference. What am I doing wrong?!?! Have i not charged the clicker properly? Should I give the verbal cue for sit? Any help appreciated as at the moment i feel like giving up lol. I thought the clicker would be good as i have made the mistake of when previously training her (without the clicker) I didnt phase out the treats enough and so i think this is why she isnt eager enough because she knows if she does it eventually she will more than likely get a treat.

I forgot to mention that when she sat and i clicked if she was going to move for the treat she moved when i had thrown the treat and didnt come looking for it once i had clicked. So have i answered my own question in that I havnt charged the clicker properly?

hi
would not call myself an expert on clicker training, but I think I know the basics after doing nearly three years of animal training degree based around the use of a clicker. 

I do not completly understand your second post, do you mean that you click as she gets up after sitting and as she goes towards the treat? because this is teaching her that she is being rewarded for getting up out of the sit position. 

I was taught to not wait for a behaviour while introducing the clicker and just flood the animal with click =treat.

One of my friends dogs (a labrador) was new what the click meant, but would not leave your side if he new you had food, so I left the treats in the kitchen and because he knew the click meant treat, he worked a bit better, but I asked one of my tutors how to increase the amount of behaviours and she said to get a cardboard box and put it on the floor and click for every behaviour that is offered, and then not click for that behaviour again.  This means you are not teaching the dog any behaviour, but teaching them to think for themselves.  After doing this a couple of times, I went back to using the clicker to get a specific behaviour and it worked really well.

Once the dog understands it has got to think for itself, it will give you a wide range of behaviours that you can then pick on and focus on that one.

good luck and enjoy it

hi, thanks for replying. in my second post i meant i click the second her bum touches the floor then throw the treat a few feet away from her. Once she sees the treat she will sometimes get up and eat it but not all the time. From what I have read if she understands that the click is signaling she has done the right thing then apparantly she should look for the treat immediatly, sometimes she will ignore the treat and just look at me. Ive just finished making her touch my hand with her nose and she actually seemed to pick that up quite quickly, i just kept putting my hand in a different place. But then she got bored after a few minutes and asked to go out lol.

Excellent tip on cardboard box, will try that this later this afternoon. I am having slight problems with her coming to me for treats full stop anyway at the minute. Not long ago the smell of nice food would have her next to me in seconds. A little while ago however i purchased a gentle leader and while gradually getting her used to it (she doesnt mind wearing it at all now but only with out lead attatched!) she started associating nice food with gentle leader and started running away instead. She still runs to the couch when i put it on her but she is always wagging her tail, not sure if running away from treats has now become a game for her.

Hi

There could be a few reasons for this.

Firstly, it could be that the food is not interesting enough to her, as a reward.  To combat this, I would wait till she is hungry - maybe train just before a meal, or even skip a meal and then train a few hours later.  And make sure you are using food which is tasty.   Her ordinary kibble might not be enough - you might need to use chopped up cheese or hotdogs or something like that.

Secondly, the reason could be that she hasn't yet worked out that the click is the end of the behaviour.  She might think that, the click means she is doing the right thing, so if she keeps on doing it, maybe she'll get more food.  You are doing the right thing by throwing the food away from her.  Can you encourage her to get it - point to it and tell her how yummy it is? 

Otherwise you could try luring her out of the position.  So - say sit, click, then put the treat on her nose and lure her out of the sit and drop the treat on the floor for her to eat once she has moved out of the sit.

The other thing you could try is - not using the clicker, and just throwing food about on the floor and getting her used to chasing after it and eating it.  Then, when you introduce the sit and the click again, she should be conditioned to chase the food when you throw it on the floor. 

If I understand right, to charge the clicker, you clicked and treated if she was doing something; really the idea I've always been taught when charging the clicker up, is to just literally click and treat, click and treat, for many repetitions untili you can see her showing by her interest that she knows the click means "treat" - you can then start to train using the clicker. It may be that if you charged it up by clicking for something she did, it has confused her.

I agree with what onetwothree has suggested :)

Have you got any good clicker books? I like "Clicker training for dogs" by Karen Pryor as it has very good photos :)
and "Click for Joy" will answer many of your questions once you really get into it, it's probably one of my top clicker books.

Lindsay
x

I agree with Lindsay.  Click for Joy is a great book - by Melissa Alexander and you can get it from Amazon.

Thanks for that lindsay, just ordered it now! I have been kind of follwing the culture clash but the book is quite hard to find references etc not having an index!

Fear not, here is an Index to the Culture Clash - just for you :)

http://www.clickersolutions.com/articles/2001/tccindex.htm

onetwothree you are an absolute star!!!

Hi onetwothree, what i have read so far (on the net) seemed to imply that i shouldnt talk to her while training so as not to confuse her with too many things and to let her work it out for herself, i kind of thought this meant after the click aswell (doh) so i just kind of flicked the treat to get her attention lol. She does seem to be getting the hang of it a bit more, when she was touching my hand with her nose she went for the treat straight away and immediatly turned around to see if my hand was out stretched. I think the book will help as at least it will be exactly the same method, problem with reading diff articles on the net is that some of them differ slightly and as i understand tarining has to be consistant. Thanks for your help.

Personally I talk to my dogs while I'm training them - and the rest of the time too, lol :D

I use my voice to tell them that they're almost there - a little bit more of a behaviour and they'll get a click.  It's what's known as an intermediate bridging stimulus - the clicker is a bridging stimulus (it bridges the gap between the correct behaviour) and my voice is the intermediate (bridging the behaviour and the click if the dog is almost there but needs encouragement).  I tend to use it more with Opi than Remy - Remy will just throw every behaviour at me until I click him if he doesn't know what to do, and if he does, he'll just keep trying harder until i click, whereas Opi is a little less confident with training - the clicker helps, but sometimes she needs me to say "that's it" or "yes" to give her a verbal nudge to keep going.  I also do a little maniacal nod meaning the same thing!

Hi there,

What breed is she? How old is she? Where do you train? What are you using for treats? How long are you training for?

Without seeing you and the dog one cannot tell for sure, but it sounds to me very much like you are either trying too hard, have done too much training, your training sessions are too long or too intensive for your particular dog.

People often get very excited about a new training method and end up pushing the dog too far in their enthusiasm. Therefore the dog ends up seeing the training as a chore, rather than something enjoyable.

If you have always given a treat after the click for at least 30 repetitions, then the classical association has been made. The clicker is not a magic sound and not all dogs like it (I know of one that is petrified of it - for several reasons).  It is the association made with the clicker that counts. So if you have trained for too long, in too distracting environments, have gotten yourself or the dog frustrated, the titbits are not good enough, you are confusing the dog, etc, etc then the dog will know that the click means a treat, but the association is not what we intended it to be - i.e. a purely positive one that the dog wants to work for.

My recommendation would be to go down a gear. Take super yummy titbits and put them in a bowl next to you on a table (so that you don't have them in your hands). Stand up and if your dog looks at you, click and throw the titbit saying something like 'go ge it!!' in a cheerful way. Do not call your dog or put any pressure on it whatsoever, just wait quietly. The dog is likely to look back at you after fetching the first treat, click again and repeat. Do this only 3 times and leave the dog wanting more. Say 'finished' show her your hands and put the bowl and clicker away. Leave her with a seriously positive association with your training, so that next time the bowl comes out, she wants to work for the treats. Only do 2 or 3 repetitions per training sessions and only do maximum of 3 training sessions per day. This will be a total of about 6 minutes training in a day. Any more and you are going to start to make a negative association with the clicker, especially if your breed is one that likes lying about (e.g. flock guarding breeds).

I deal with a lot of 'hard to motivate' dogs that simply do not care for the clicker (my great dane being one of those 4 years ago) so I know how hard some breeds can be. Unfortunately, trainers that have easy to motivate dogs (e.g. gundogs and collies) don't realise this and are not able to cope with these problems. Again, a problem I encountered myself with my great dane. People/some trainers just didn't understand the breed and why he did what he did (or not!) as they had no experience of training those type of breeds. 

At the moment I am dealing with a staffie and a bouvier with the same issues as you have. Put them in the right environment and frame of mind and the perform excellently.

Not all training methods will work with all breeds, so you need to understand why your dog is not motivated enough to go out for the treat.

Take comfort that once the dog gets the 'hang' of clicker training and understands the game, then you will get a dog hooked on clicker training forever more.

My suggestion would be to go to a clicker trainer that can show you why the clicker works (learning theory), how to use it properly, what easy and simple exercises to do with your dog to get you started. They will be able to assess you and the dog on why it may not be working.

Do let us know the answers to the above, as I may be able to give you a couple of more relevant pointers once I know information.

Cheers,
Patty

Hi Patty, you dont live near luton do you? You sound very similar, if you remember a mad gsd x rottie called Twix jumping into your pond then it must be you lol. She is 8 months now and coming on brilliantly, we train in the front room, garden and on the common (before we got the clicker) rest of the house is out of bounds as the cats and Twix really dont get on. I think you could be right in that I am training her for slightly too long, we do it for about 5 mins 3 times a day and a few times she has slumped on the couch having enough. She is very laid back at home and unless in the garden she isnt really interested in playing. The same when we go for walks in the common, i can have a mad game of footy or tug in the garden with her but on our walks she isnt interested. Same with the rewards, in the house (before the clicker!) she was very responsive if she knew we were going to train, not so keen on food if we are out though. This is why i thought the clicker may help, if i could get her wanting to work for it inside then it may make things easier outside. Off lead she always sticks with me unless she sees another dog. At the moment she goes back on lead when i see another approaching, i then carry on walking towards them (trying to get her noticing me but not letting her pull) but the problem is that when people see a largish gsd looking type dog on a lead they immediatly presume she is dangerous and dive into a bush to run into the next feild. This couldnt be further away from the truth, she is pathetically soft natured. Yesturday she seems to have learnt that if she touches my hand with her nose then she gets a treat so i am guessing she is catching on but i will shorten the length of time we train for. I guess she doesnt always seem as 'into' me as she used to be and it can sometimes be disheartening. Thanks for your help.

Aha! Ofcourse I remember you and gorgeous little Twixy!!!!! She came on wonderfully in puppy class!

It's such a shame that you couldn't join my clicker class, as I have just started one in Jan. We are now moving to Oxfordshire, so unfortunately won't be doing any more. :-(

I know what you mean about people moving over when they see a big dog, imagine the response I get with my big black dexter! Children, prams, dogs, everything gets out of his way :-) I either get that response or the complete opposite one and they come hugging him (poor dog!)

As I remember, Twix was always very interested in the pups in class, so she finds other doggies very interesting and fun to be with. It is a good idea to keep her on lead if you see another dog, so that she doesn't get into the habit of running off to play with other dogs. However, it is very important to check with the other owner to see if it's ok for them to play together, as the more you let her have interactions with all sorts of dogs (even grumpy ones) the less she will find them interesting and it is important to keep the socialising up. Make sure you play controlled games with her. For example, as her to sit-stay, throw her favourite toy, send her to fetch it and then run backwards to encourage her to come to you with it. You can also hide her toy , ask her to sit-stay and send her to 'find it'. Hiding and getting her to find you is also a good game to play outside.

The other thing is that she is entering those 'lovely' adolescent months (we love them... not!) and you will find that all the training you have done goes out the window for a little while. So, this is the time to keep doing reward-based training but making it a bit easier for her. Don't always use titbits, she knows her basic stuff, make her work for other things she wants like attention, cuddles, games, toys. Don't let her have these things for free, ask her to do something (anything at all - sit , paw, stay, 'touch', etc) and then reward her with a little tug game, cuddles, the chance to go into the garder, anything she wants. Again, don't do too much, otherwise the novelty will wear off.

Also, rotties are very laid back doggies, so maybe the rottie in her is coming out :-)

The last thing to bear in mind is that she may be coming into season and the hormone rollercoaster the go through can temporarily change their behaviour. They may be more lethargic, disinterested, etc.

Basically, you should be able to ride the wave by just keeping training sessions really short and very, very exciting for her. See her state of mind, if she is looking active then give it a go, if she is looking tired or is resting, then best to wait until next time.

But yes, it's likely to be her lovely adolescent months (so don't expect her to be back to her angelic self until she is 18 months old) :-D

If you send me a PM (or an email) I can forward you a list of recommended clicker books and websites.

Tailwags and sloppy licks to Twixy!

Luv,
Patty