Reaching The Animal Mind: Clicker Training And ...

Karen Pryor gives everyone the technology for not just reaching into animal minds but glimpsing their souls. Reaching the Animal Mind is about an entirely new way to see, understand, and communicate with animals.

Reaching the animal mind: clicker training and ...

A Dog World Top 12 Training and Behavior Book - 2010!2009 DWAA Maxwell Winner of the Best Training and Behavior CategoryFrom the pioneer in the field of clicker training comes an illuminating and revealing look into the minds of all animals. Karen Pryor has improved the lives of millions of animals. A celebrated pioneer in the field of no punishment animal training, she introduced an innovative training system in her groundbreaking bestseller "Don't Shoot the Dog!" Now, after thirty years of training creatures both tame and wild, Pryor presents the sum total of what she knows about teaching animals and what they in turn have taught her. Pryor's all-positive clicker-training system is a safe, effective way to modify and shape behavior. Karen can teach anyone to train animals with a cheap, plastic, hand held clicker, rewarding wanted behaviors -- click! -- and ignoring the unwanted. No leash-jerking. No pushing. No smacking. Animals quickly learn that one behavior gets them a reinforcing click and a bit of food, and undesirable behaviors get them, well, nothing at all. Given the choice, animals quickly focus on what works and abandon what doesn't. "Reaching the Animal Mind" uses clear, accessible language that will allow anyone to master Pryor's training system. Pryor also entertains by introducing some of her more interesting pupils. Ponies are taught to surf, gloomy birds learn how to play, a rhinoceros routinely leans against a fence for a pedicure, and dogs learn everything with pointed ears and shining eyes that seem to say "You want what? I can do that; watch me!" Throughout the book, Pryor provides Web addresses where the reader can access video of the actual training sessions that she describes. Practical and engrossing, Pryor explains the science behind her system, how it works and why it works, its applications for teaching humans, as well as step-by-step instructions on how to clicker-train your cat to give you a high five or your dog to find your car keys. What could be better than that? "Karen Pryor has been at the forefront of humane and science-based training for decades, and this book shows us why. With compelling stories and accessible science, Reaching the Animal Mind is an inspiration for everyone who loves animals and wants to train them with compassion and respect. Whether you're an experienced clicker trainer or someone who just wants their dog to stop barking without having to yell, you really, truly want this book!" - Dr. Patricia McConnell, author of The Other End of the Leash and Tales of Two Species

Pawsitive Pet Behavior, llc strives to assist pet owners in developing and maintaining good behavior in their companion animals. We provide high quality behavioral solutions for cats and dogs and are nationally certified by The Certification Council of Professional Dog Trainers. Maintaining credentials requires rigorous continuing education and re-certification every three years. This continuing education ensures that we are knowledgeable about the most current thinking, research, and techniques in the field. We will help you learn how your dog thinks, learns and communicates. We are experienced in training pets, their people and other animal care professionals. We have extensive experience with shelters and rescues as well as experience with many purebred dogs from Chihuahuas to Great Danes and everything in between. Our methods are based on the current science of how animals learn, interpreting the animal's body language and clear communication between pets and their owners. We teach you to read your pet's visual signals so that you are better able to understand and relate to your pet and help you understand what motivates your pet and why and ultimately how to use those motivations to teach your pet the things you need him or her to know. We currently serve Greene, Montgomery and Warren Counties of Ohio. We also are now servicing Vandalia, Tipp City and Troy. Other areas are considered on a case by case basis.

The original dog whisperer, Paul Owens, teaches dog parents how to positively train their dogs according to how dogs learn. He uses a humane, science-based approach, and includes breathing exercises people can do when stressed so that they can teach their dog in a calm way. The Dog Whisperer goes over how to teach and train your dog during distractions and context learning, as well as introduces readers to clicker training, shaping behaviors and target training. This is a good book on humane, positive training to have on the shelf.

Despite the prominence of positive reinforcement-based training methods in the professional dog training community (Blackwell et al., 2008; Hiby, Rooney & Bradshaw, 2004), recommendations of how, when, and what method of positive reinforcement should be used are inconsistent (see Browne et al. (2017), for a review of the general content in best-selling dog training books). Indeed, more generally, the research reveals mixed results as to the best approach to train animals. Studies in other species have shown that, as compared to the use of both a primary and secondary reinforcer, the use of a primary reinforcer alone when establishing a new behavior is more effective in cats (Willson et al., 2017), but less effective in goats (Langbein et al., 2007), and equally effective in horses (McCall & Burgin, 2002).

Given that prior studies varied along multiple procedural dimensions that could have affected acquisition of a novel behavior, we saw the need for a cohesive set of experiments that utilized participants of a similar age, with similar training histories, and that received the same amount of time to complete the testing protocol. By utilizing a single-session design and testing puppies naïve to training, we believe that any indication of greater performance by clicker-trained dogs could be more clearly related to the relationship between the reinforcement method and the behavior being trained.

In order to test for potential differences in delay to reinforcement between the three groups, we randomly selected 12 out of 25 dogs in the primary alone and clicker secondary groups and 10 out of 25 in the verbal secondary group and had coders blind to the study aims and methods analyze the first, middle, and last 2-min segments of their testing videos for delays to primary reinforcement by using BORIS (Version 5.1.0; Friard & Gamba, 2016). Average delays to reinforcement per condition for the primary alone, verbal secondary and clicker secondary groups were 3.0 s (SD = 1.4), 2.5 s (SD = 1.4) and 4.0 s (SD = 2.0) respectively. While it is possible that dogs in the clicker secondary group were negatively impacted by the greater delay to reinforcement they experienced compared to the other reinforcement groups, it should be noted that, because, on average they completed more steps in the distance phase of training than dogs in either of the other two groups, they necessarily waited longer as the trainer walked the additional distance to deliver primary reinforcement to them. 041b061a72