For a very good guide to all sorts of dog training processes and dog behavior challenges, I use and recommend Clickertraining ...that link goes to the description of this terrific ebook you download immediately, wherever you are! -- Rosana

The folks from Dogwise go to the annual APDT (Association of Pet Dog Trainers) conferences, and after the one this year, they reported that there is an ongoing demand for good books on dog clicker training, at the beginning level.

Here are three top picks of theirs. I’m sure any of these would take you well beyond what I cover in  my free ebook on dog clicker training.

Clicking on any of the book covers below will take you to the pages at Dogwise, where you can learn more about each book.

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Want to get better at dog clicker training? Here’s a way that you probably would not have thought up: learn to clicker train chickens! Long-time dog trainer Terry Ryan is one of several trainers who have taught workshops on clicker training chickens as a way to master clicker training dogs! You get away from a lot of the stereotypes about training by working with chickens!

So now Terry has made a five-hour DVD based on a workshop she did.  I quote a bit:

Why Train a Chicken?

• Trainer’s are not “bonded” to their chickens.
• Chickens do not have big brown eyes.
• Trainers do not have bad (or good!) chicken training habits because they’ve never trained a chicken before, thus avoiding the baggage often taken to dog training workshops.
• You will not be showing your chickens at the next performance event, nor will you be taking them home, so there is no pressure on what will happen in the future.

If you click on the image, it takes you to Dogwise… Amazon didn’t have this. Even if you have no plans to train a chicken,  it’s fun to see the little snippet of video from the program. I found the first part of it a little confusing, but after a while I caught on that the chicken was going in figure 8s in one situation and  in an oval in another. A couple of times I caught it glancing at the trainer in the very same way our dogs glance at me to assess whether I am about to click and treat!

It just happens that Kelly and I have had chickens a couple of times, in different places, and not long ago we were chatting about maybe getting them again. Hmm… if we do, I think I will have to get this DVD myself and play around with it!

Dog clicker training is a great way to have a lot of fun with your dog and get the training done at the same time! I like it so much that I’ve written a free ebook, Seven Steps to Clicker Training with Your Dog — that link takes you to where you can sign up for it.

Listen to a short audio about this method:

If you would rather read than listen — or want to do both — this audio is based loosely on this page of my website: Dog Clicker Training.

And if you would like to download this audio to listen to on an mp3 player, for example, here is the direct link to it. Just right-click or the Mac equivalent to save it to your computer:

http://www.training-dogs.com/sound-files/dog-clicker-training.mp3

I’m a big fan of crate training, but not for all dogs. That link takes you to a long page I wrote about the main website about crate training, how to do it, and when not to. But I don’t talk about clicker training there. So as I’ve been reading Clickertraining: the 4 Secrets of Becoming a Supertrainer recently, I noticed that they have a chapter on crate training. It’s near the end of the ebook, and so I thought it might draw on clicker methods that would be pretty advanced. It doesn’t really though.

I was very pleased to see that Morten and Cecilie, the authors of the ebook, take the same view I do that crate training is not something to be rushed!

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