posted
on Wednesday, May 21, 2025
in
Pet Help
The Animal Rescue League of Iowa promotes using positive reinforcement methods to not only train your dog but to build and strengthen your life-long relationship.
Positive reinforcement is all about rewarding the behaviors you want to see. When your dog does something right, they earn a treat, praise, or toy. Over time, those good behaviors stick, and your relationship grows stronger.
Clicker training is a method of training based on the scientific principles of learning. Put simply, a behavior that is rewarded is more likely to be repeated. Remembering that most behaviors we want our dogs to perform and maintain may not be “natural” behaviors to them, it makes sense that during the learning phase, new desired behaviors should be rewarded while undesired behaviors are ignored or managed until they are replaced.
Clicker training incorporates a marker (the click) to communicate with the learner that they performed what the trainer was looking for at the very instant the behavior was performed. The “click” signifies to the learner that a reward will be coming. Since dogs don’t speak human (and we don’t speak dog), using a clicker will help to bridge the communication gap. The sound of the clicker is more consistent and is more reliably reproduced than using the human voice to say “good dog” or “way to go”. This precision in marking correct behaviors will help to speed up the learner’s understanding and therefore the training process.
It’s simple:
Get it. Click it. Reward it.
With a little practice (and a lot of rewards), you and your dog will build skills together — and enjoy the process along the way.