PetLvr.com - [The Blog]

Once a dog has learned to sit, come, fetch, and stay, and perhaps do a few tricks, many pawrents stop training new behaviors. It’s easy to stop with the basics, but ongoing training yields many rewards. Dogs learning new behaviors throughout their lives are happier, calmer, and can even help with chores around the house. Armed with just a clicker and a bag of treats, you can teach these useful behaviors to your dog. This is the first of a series.

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Sitting patiently by your side, your dog nuzzles your thigh and scooches closer to the kitchen table. His sniffing gets frantic as if he is trying to create a vacuum to suck up your evening dinner. You say “no” in a firm voice, but he can’t resist the smells coming from your dish so a bark escapes from his mouth, which ends in a whine. He looks up at you with those pleading eyes-how can you resist? Just a crumb of bread and taste of hamburger won’t hurt, right? But over time that crumb and taste turns into an entire portion or maybe even a double portion. Before you know it, your dog or cat is too heavy and tired to move and its face is hidden in the rolls bulging from its neck.

Maybe you think you have more self-control than that, but approximately 500,000 pets have become obese, and there has been a 10% increase since the previous year. Although you and your pet receive immediate satisfaction from extra treats, the long-term affects can be lethal to your pet’s well being. Obese pets often suffer from respiratory problems such as asthma as well as other ailments like arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, liver problems, etc.

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Would you like to teach your horse to lie down on command? How about improving your mare’s flying lead changes, or testing a young horse’s jumping potential without needing to place a rider on his back? All of these and more are possible with one small training device that costs under $5.00 and never touches your horse: A clicker.

Clicker training is one of the most popular methods for training dogs, but many horse owners have discovered that it works like a charm for teaching everything from parlor tricks to high-level dressage maneuvers to horses. Clicker training, developed from methods used to train dolphins, uses operant conditioning and positive reinforcement to gradually develop behaviors. Even goldfish can learn tricks this way. Check out the video posted here for proof!

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