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How to educate your pet gently and effectively with clicker training. Dog education can become a life changing experience. How can you teach a dolphin or a killer whale to perform those amazing stunts and tricks? There is no way to physically force them to obey a command or to punish them for incorrect behavior. Professional animal trainers found that the only effective way is the positive approach to training. Rewarding the wanted action and ignoring everything else is a much more pleasurable and efficient way than to train with traditional methods focused on punishment. Clicker training builds a bond between people and the animals in their lives and becomes a mean of communication between trainer and trainee. With dog clicker training, first the pet learns to associate the click with rewards. Then the click is used to mark the wanted action. Perfect timing is essential, this way the dog learns to associate the action-click-reward sequence and understands quickly how he is expected to behave. The idea behind the clicker training is to associate a peculiar sound, the click, to the wanted action. Only later the dog is asked to act on verbal cue. With this method progress is quick and long repetitions are not necessary. Karen Pryor, a scientist and leader in the field of animal training, was one of the first to use the clicker training techniques with dogs and her methods proved to be quick and effective. Dog clicker training is especially successful for whippets, hounds and independent thinkers that don’t like to bend to authority but happily accept a leader if gently guided. Learning this new approach to dog training often changes also the way people think and act in their ordinary lives. Focusing on positive reinforcement not only helps people to live and communicate with animals but can also promote a new way of thinking and a more open attitude toward other people.
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