20 Treats & a Clicker

This is what I start every training session with.

When the dogs see me go to the cupboard where the treats and clicker are kept they start going a little bit crazy.  Dancing and bouncing around me until I have the amount of treats counted out into each little dish and then the mad dash to the training space.

I mix up where we train, sometimes in the laundry room, sometimes in the living room, sometimes in my office, sometimes in the yard and sometimes on the covered patio.  Though I have to admit with the inclement weather of late we've mostly been doing our stuff indoors.

I always have a plan for our little training sessions.  For Zoe we've been working on our articles lately.  To be more exact it's the metal articles.  This is my basket of training articles.  The wooden and leather articles are homemade, blocks of wood and an old leather belt cut up and knotted into rounds with a leather shoe lace and a set of metal articles a friend gave to us.  We did start out using the metal rings from my canning cupboard though. 

When I first started clicker training. I used this to get my dogs to interact with something.

The method is called "101 Things to do with a Cardboard box".  You would be surprised what your dog can come up with.  Sassy was the most inventive of my two.  After about the 4th or 5th training session with the box she decided to try and put a toy in it.  By clicking this behaviour I was able to shape it and we use this as a trick.

Now I can put anything on the floor and both my dogs will try to interact with it.  Again, Sassy is the more inventive of the two, she will start out with nose touches, then paw touches, then mouthing, retrieving etc....

I have used the clicker to start Sassy using the skateboard.  We are up to tentatively moving the board.  When we first began with this trick I only had the board on the carpet, where it wouldn't suddenly roll away and startle the dogs.  Sassy progressed very rapidly from nose touching to climbing on board to taking one step. Now that she is doing that I have moved to a smoother carpeted area so the board actually moves.  She's just on the brink of making the connection between the board moving and her feet moving.  By this spring I expect we'll be outside with the rest of the kids skateboarding up and down the street.

The sky's the limit it seems for what you can train with a clicker and a hand full of treats.