What is Clicker Training for Dogs?

    A dog-training clicker is a small thing you can hold in your hand or wear on a chain around your neck. When your dog does what you ask it to, at the very moment it sits or whatever, you click the clicker. This sound tells the dog (after you do some pre-training) that that's what you wanted. Then you give the dog a reward, food or praise, but the neat thing is that the reward can be delayed from the time of the desired action.

You can chain together actions, for example, the dog can learn to go down, roll over, and stand back up in one series.

It's fun, quite simple, and effective. And it sure beats a lot of the older pain-based methods! Here I am training my sister's Boston Terrier to balance on her back legs. I wasn't planning to teach her that, but when she offered the behavior by chance, I began shaping for it, that is, rewarding the steps toward it.