Quote (Farine @ Apr 24 2015 03:46pm)
clicker?
Just a little plastic thing that clicks really loud when you press it. The idea is you click it when your dog does something good, then give the dog a treat. Say you're trying to get it to sit from across the room. You say sit, it sits, then you walk forward to feed it a treat. Since there's so much time and so many things happening between when it sits and it gets the treat, it's harder for the dog to know exactly what it did right.
Instead, you click the clicker from across the room right when the dog's butt hits the floor and, since you have now associated treats with the clicker, it knows that's why it is getting a treat.
Some people just say "yes!" or "good boy/girl!" really enthusiastically to mark when the right action is done, but those phrases are common enough that the dog will hear it plenty of times without then receiving a treat. The click is associated with one and only one thing.
tl;dr, it's a conditioning device. Dog learns click = treat and command+action (sit, lay down, shake) = click therefore command+action = treat. Then you phase out the click and make treats random to master the command.
This post was edited by dxlightning on Apr 24 2015 01:57pm