Clicker Training for Dogs New Haven CT

Back in the day, when you watched Flipper perform amazing feats on television or oohed and aahed over the shows put on by killer whales at Sea World, you might have been surprised to learn that you could teach your dog tricks and behaviors using the very same technique that marine mammal trainers have found so successful: sound, treat, sound, treat.

It was in the 1960s that marine mammal trainers, led by Keller Breland, pioneered the use of what are known as conditioned reinforcers, usually the sound of a whistle, to train whales, dolphins, seals and polar bears. Breland called the whistle a bridging stimulus, because in addition to informing the dolphin that it had just earned a fish, the whistle bridged the period of time between the leap in midtank — the behavior that was being reinforced — and swimming over to the side to collect its pay.

The use of a signal that means “that’s it, here comes a reward” (a conditioned reinforcer) has been around much longer than clicker training per se, says Jean Donaldson, director of the Academy for Dog Trainers at the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), and author of the book The Culture Clash (James and Kenneth, 1997). “In the laboratories of American behaviorists, such as B.F. Skinner, in the 1940s and 1950s, the sound of a food dispenser functioned exactly like a clicker,” Donaldson says.

Author: By Kim Campbell Thornton

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