The best way to train animals.

I wish I knew about clicker training when I was a kid. I'd have spent hours clicker training our dogs and cat. It's more fun than traditional training, more effective and a lot faster.

I just finished reading Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals by Karen Pryor. I'm interested in books about applied behaviour analysis, but the only ones I can seem to find are about animals.

Anyway, she talks about the joys of clicker training or "TAG" training for humans. It works like this, you click the clicker when the animal does something you want it to do, then you feed it a treat. The food is the primary reinforcer; the clicker is the secondary reinforcer.

Over time, the animals learn to love the sound of the clicker and it sort of becomes the primary reinforcer. Pryor takes a swipe at traditional, fear-based training techniques as slow, cumbersome and built on fear and discomfort. Not good at all.

Clicker training, on the other hand, becomes a sort of game that animals begin to enjoy. The click is the indication that the animal has done something good. The food is just the treat.

She talks about training a crab to ring a bell for food. She talks about training dolphins, dogs, horses, cats, elephants, fish and people with autism and down syndrome. Also athletes who need to perform complicated maneuvers like gymnasts or golfers.

There isn't much practical advice in the book, and I'm guessing you have to sign up for her (expensive?) training courses. Still, clicking is an emerging training trend that can help us to get animals to do what we want easier and faster.*

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* Of course, the animals think of it as training humans to give them treats, and that's fine too. It doesn't matter who's training who, as long as it works.