Clicker Puppy

Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 8:36 am

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

I’ve just spent the past 45 minutes with a DVD called CLICKER PUPPY (link goes to Dogwise).

It’s a program featuring children and teens (ages 5 to 13) and puppies (as young as 8 weeks to 5 months). The children are clicker training the puppies, and very quickly too. Some very young puppies learn to sit and do a variety of other things in just a few minutes! How much training each puppy has had is mentioned… several had had none beforehand.

Given the nature of the participants, the program is very spontaneous and appears more like a good quality home production than a slick professional program. This is much of the charm of the program for me.

To my mind, the best use of the program would be showing it to children as part of helping them get the basics of clicker training. I’m sure any dog-loving child would want to try it themselves!

Clicker training puppies is arguably the best way to train them, and this program should help with that. I think it would be a bit basic for adults… or is it just that the kids make it look so easy?

You can find out more about what is in the program at the page about it here:

http://www.doggonecrazy.ca/clicker%20puppy.htm — and you can download clips or you can buy it there if you are in Canada.

It’s also at Dogwise, clickertraining.com, and at Amazon.com, though Amazon said it would take them a couple of months to fill your order when I was there. They also had it described as featuring clicker trainer Karen Pryor, which it doesn’t do. She endorses it, though.

Now, as a detail person and as a former video producer myself, I did find small things to quibble about.

Clicker training puppies is compared with lure and reward, but the latter term isn’t defined.
There is no list of topics for easy reference, nor are there any credits for who produced the program or who did the voice over. The children are mentioned by name in some cases but they don’t get credits.
Where they show how to teach a puppy to jump, they show a rather large puppy (Kona) being taught to jump and they say you shouldn’t train a large puppy to jump but don’t explain why. Better to leave her out altogether, specially since the footage of a little puppy does the job.

The program comes with some bonuses. One is training tips. Another is essentially an ad for a DVD coming soon (they then say early 2005) on the tagteach method, which is using clickers to teach humans. I got a kick out the clicker critter section, with tame rabbits, hamsters, and ferrets being clicker trained by kids and adults.

The last section, Speak Dog, shows photos of dog facial expressions and tail positions and points out which dogs you should be wary of and which are demonstrating happy faces. Useful bit. I wasn’t surprised to see this last bit as producer Joan Orr, who sent me the DVD for review, also is a cofounder of Doggonesafe, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to dog bite prevention through education, most worthwhile goal.

So here it is at Amazon; just click on the image to go there…