If you are willing to train your dog you might want to know about the ‘dog clicker training’ method, which has recently become popular amongst dog trainers all over the country.    In this method the trainer uses a clicker, a tiny plastic box with a metal button which makes a unique click sound when the button has been pressed.

This training method is not complex and it is in many ways parallel to the positive training method. This is how you can make it work. Make up your mind as to what behaviour you want to reinforce or teach your dog.Certain behaviour comes naturally to the dog like sitting, eating, standing, barking etc. These need only be reinforced to let your dog know when you would like him/her to do what.

Several other actions such as acting dead, shaking hands, rolling over,are not inborn actions in the dog and need to be taught.

Clicker training is usually used to do both.

Clicker training functions according to the basic principles of operant conditioning, by associating the sound of the clicker with a food item that the dog particularly likes.

What you have to do is to use the clicker to command the dog to do something, the dog, given that he associates the click with the food, immediately obliges and the training occurs.

Let us take an example to illustrate the training of a dog with a clicker better, imagine you want to teach your dog to sit, you put a biscuit on your dog’s nose playfully and then move it upwards, the dog will obviously follow the movement of the biscuit with its nose and will then naturally rest its haunches on the ground, thereby putting itself in a sitting position.

Now time your clicking accurately for it to occur right as the dog seats, and then give him/her the biscuit and praise him/her.

Go on doing this for some time until the dog begins to associate the clicking with the food until the click makes him/her sit without your persuading it with treats.

Now teach him/her some other behavior, remembering to attach the clicking cue only once the animal himself offers you the behavior you expect, otherwise the clicking will not be connected to anything in the dog’s head and it may be confused as to what it means.

Your dog is a clever little animal and you must give him/her the credit it deserves.

Although some trainers have been known to use negative reinforcement techniques together with the clicker method, this simply does not work because punishment always creates a number of cases of unwanted behavior even if it serves the primary purpose of teaching the dog not to do something for a period of time.

Any sort of training is a strenuous and rigorous process and needs time as well as patience.

Although dog clicker training method has a high success rate it might not work for certain kinds of dogs, if you see that it’s not working for your pet you would be well advised to use some other technique to teach it tricks.