Clicker Training Pepper

Miss Pepper has never really been trained with the clicker before, at least not that I remember. I have started shaping behaviours a lot more often since getting Payton, so I don’t think I really did a lot with her previously. So now that she’s here, it’s time for the clicker training. Previous to this video, I did one quick session where I asked her for sits and downs and C&T for each. With Payton I really didn’t do any “charging” of the clicker and it has obviously not been a problem for him, but Pepper has four years of learning WITHOUT the clicker so I thought I would put a small deposit into her clicker training bank account before starting. But that is all I did.

I tried to figure out which behaviour I thought would be best to start with and decided one of the easiest things to do – and the easiest to “show” for video purposes – was to teach her how to target an object. Both of my boys are very good at this and even Georgie is pretty quick to try targetting stuff if she thinks it will get her a cookie… so easy enough, right? Right.

Watch the video, then read below for how I approached this training session!

At first I wasn’t sure what she would do when I put the frisbee (my favourite starting target) down on the floor. Would she go sniff it, mouth it, maybe even paw at it right off the bat? So I put the frisbee down and just watched to see what she would do before I decided what to click. Well, I should have predicted she wouldn’t do ANYTHING, but as usual I forgot that she is completely unlike my other dogs. So after a few seconds I knew my first move was to just click for looking at the frisbee. I quickly realized I also needed to use my treat placement to help out and started throwing the cookies towards the frisbee. I flipped it upside down, which is usually how I use it when it’s a food target, because the cookies would then get trapped in the frisbee. This let me reward for sniffing the frisbee, then I started waiting for an actual nose touch rather than just a sniff.
I started waiting for forward paw movement, but before she really started doing that, she actually pushed the frisbee with her nose. This was exciting to me, so I clicked it and decided to reward that for a while. We ended the session there!