Conditioning
J made me drop my cutlery at lunch today, in front of everyone. It clattered on my plate, and everyone was staring at me while I gazed at him stupidly, expecting a treat. And all because of the clicker. We’d been looking for some way to condition me for a while – for making me display a certain behaviour involuntarily, without engaging my conscious mind. That was when J came across the idea of “clicker training”. The idea behind it is simple: If you want a certain behaviour from a dog, you just wait until it displays that behaviour naturally, even accidentally, and then you make a certain sound. Most people use a device that produces a sharp click – a clicker. You reward the dog, and over time it associates the sound of the clicker with the behaviour, and the behaviour with the reward. He’d been using the clicker for a while when playing with me as a dog. Every time I did something he liked, he would press the clicker, and give me a reward – sometimes in the form of a pet, or a t...