Fun with Dogs!

Someone on the Clicker Solutions Yahoo Group was having trouble teaching her dog to go to a mat and I said I would do a video with Max, the German Shepherd Dog currently living at my house - Max is a lovely, neutered six year old dog who really needs a person of his own if anyone is interested in adopting him!  It seems that her issues with the go to mat were resolved yesterday with a Kay Laurence or Sue Ailsbery solution but I still thought it would be fun to do a little video of my doing the Leslie McDevitt Control Unleashed exercise.

This is Max’s fifth or sixth clicker session and only his third go to mat session with a week at a kennel in between the second and third sessions.

And then the old fashioned, with body pressure go to bed with my 6 year old Jack Russell Terrier, Britney.  I taught Brit to go to bed when she was a baby and have not done it in recent memory.  Notice that I do not use the clicker in this video at all.

And finally, Jellybean doing again the Control Unleashed version.

With Max, to me it looks like I am training with a clicker rather than clicker training.  I don’t know if it is because Max is not my dog or that he is just not a very smart dog at all or that I didn’t have particularly great reinforcers or that he’s come off of a week at the kennel with limited interaction with people or if we were just having an off day.  I mean, he did fine.  I am satisfied with his behavior but we were getting sits and then downs within 2 or 3 minutes in the first two sessions and it took him 13 minutes to lie down this time.  My timing wasn’t stellar with Max and he doesn’t understand a clicker well enough for me to be able to get away with not having my timing down.

At any rate, I found the three different dogs and two styles of training an interesting comparison and hope that anyone else out there finds it useful or interesting :-)