Karen Pryor’s Reaching the Animal Mind , is a fantastic guide to what clicker training is, why it works, and how to do it successfully! She covers all the basics for beginners and a lot of the details that an intermediate clicker trainer needs to know to become even better at giving positive feedback.
I found her discussion of primary, secondary, and tertiary reinforcements easy to understand and extremely useful in explaining to my clients why their dogs love clicker training so much!
Most exciting was her recognition of how to use cues to resolve fear/anxiety based issues. She does this by giving the dog an opportunity to show off his favorite “trick”. This makes him happy and so he joyfully responds to the cue even in the presence of something else that was causing anxiety. I used this same method for encouraging my fearful dog to become relaxed around strangers. I would take him to a busy time at the dog park where there were lots of other dogs (he LOVES dogs) being around other dogs relaxed him so he was easily able to forget his fear of the people. Then I taught him a fun cue, Peek-a-Boo. Peek-a-Boo is where he goes through my straddled legs like a little horse (he is a big dog!) and get a treat when he sits between my legs. He loves this cue and always demonstrates it with gusto! Now he has a way to interact with people. If they are standing with legs apart he joyfully ducks through and greets them on the other side!
Basically if you like clicker training, or just want to know what all the fuss is about you should read this book! As Pryor says, clicker training (TAGTeaching) is a new (actually about 30 year old now) technology used to help animals learn. It is just as useful on dogs as it is on coaching 8 year old to do ballet!
