Clicker training your dog: what a click means and how to teach it

Your dog does something right. You are pleased, you say good boy, you give him a treat. And he has no idea what for.

That is the problem a marker solves. Between the moment he gets it right and the moment the reward is in his mouth, there is always a gap. One second is enough for him to remember the wrong thing, because in that second he has already stood up, walked off, or started looking at your hand.

A marker puts a pin in exactly that one moment. It says: this, what you are doing now, that was it. And something is coming.

That marker can be a clicker or it can be your own voice. Both work, and the difference is smaller than people think.

What the click actually does

The click is not a command. It asks for nothing and it corrects nothing. All it says is: that moment was right.

And that is exactly why it speeds up the learning. Without a marker your dog has to puzzle out which bit of what he did earned the treat. With a marker he does not have to, because you have pointed at it.

On its own a click means nothing. To a dog who has never heard one it is just a noise. It only gets its meaning because something always follows it.

Charge it first, use it later

This is the step that gets skipped most often, and it is the most important one.

You click and you give a treat. That is all. You ask nothing of him, he does not have to do anything, he does not even have to sit. Click, treat. Click, treat.

After a while you see what you are looking for: you click and he looks at you. Not because you asked for something, but because he knows what is coming. That is the moment the clicker is ready to use.

How long that takes differs per dog, but it usually goes faster than you would think. You do not need to time it either: that look up is your signal.

Do this indoors, in a quiet room. As with anything new, you want the distraction small while he is learning something.

The biggest mistake: using it before it means anything

This is the one I see most. Someone buys a clicker, reads something about it, and uses it straight away on a new command the dog does not know yet.

Then you are doing two things at once. Your dog has to work out what you want from him and what that noise is. The marker is not helping him at that point, it is just one more puzzle on the pile.

So charge it first. Only once he looks up at a click can it point at anything.

The rules

They are short, and they are not up for negotiation.

Every click is followed by a reward. Always. Even if you click by accident, or at the wrong moment. You simply give a treat. If you do not, the click becomes unreliable and loses exactly the thing that makes it work.

One click at a time. Not two or three in a row because you are extra pleased. That does not make it clearer, only messier. If you want to show that it was really good, do that with the reward, not with the marker.

Click first, then the treat. Not at the same time, and not the other way round. The click points at the moment, the reward comes after.

How fast that reward has to follow matters less once he knows the clicker. That is the whole point of a marker: it bridges the gap. He knows it is coming and waits calmly. Early on you do want to be quick, because the link is still fresh then.

What exactly you are marking

You click on the end result. So at the moment he is doing what you wanted, not during the movement towards it.

That sounds like a detail, but it is not one. If you click too early, for instance while he is still on his way to the spot beside you, you are pointing at the walking instead of at the standing. And because a click means that was it, he can stop right there. Halfway, just short of the right spot.

So wait until he has arrived. Then click.

A clicker or your own voice

I do not use a clicker with Coco. Not because it does not work, but because I do not want to be holding one more thing while we are out. I have the lead in one hand and treats in the other, and then a clicker is one too many. "Good" is faster for me and she understands it fine.

With Lissy I did use one, and it worked perfectly well. Later on we stopped using it there too, without really deciding to.

What they have in common is that the timing is the thing that matters. Not which sound you pick, but whether it lands at the right moment.

The real differences are these:

A clicker always sounds exactly the same. Your voice does not. It moves with your mood, with how tired you are, with how tense you are. To your dog that is a slightly different signal every time. That sameness is the clicker's biggest advantage, and sometimes it genuinely helps more.

You never say "good" by accident. A clicker you can press by accident, and then you are stuck with the rule that a reward follows. That is your voice's advantage right back.

Your voice is always with you. No hands needed, no digging in your coat pocket, no third thing to hold while your dog pulls on the lead.

So what you pick is personal, and that is fine. Both have upsides and downsides and neither one is wrong.

If your dog is startled by the click

That happens, and it is no reason to give up straight away. Test it a few times first. If he gets something tasty at every click, for many dogs that noise becomes less frightening by itself, because it now predicts something good.

If after a while you see no progress at all, and he stays afraid of it even though a reward always follows, then just stick with your voice. You are not missing anything. A marker is a marker, and yours is already in your throat.

Your marker is not a release cue

Here I differ from something you will read everywhere, so I am saying it out loud.

In the clicker world "the click ends the behavior" is a well-known tenet. Karen Pryor's own site puts it that way: the click means that was right and now it is over, the dog comes to collect his reward and then starts again.

That is not how I use it. For me "good", or a click, means: this is right, and something is coming. It does not mean the exercise is over.

Why that matters: if after your marker you let him come to you or collect his reward and the exercise is done with that, you are teaching him that your marker is also your release cue. Then you can never reward him again while he has to stay somewhere. And that is exactly what you need all the time in heel, in a sit, and in a wait.

So with me the command runs on until I ask for something else or until I release him. The marker just sits in the middle of it.

I am not alone in that. On the same site there is Stay Until Released, where a trainer does it the same way and rewrites the click as the start of the reward rather than the end of the behaviour. Either way, know that both sides exist, so you are not caught out when you read it differently somewhere else.

When you stop using it

A clicker is there to teach something new. After that you do not need it any more.

You also do not fade it out gradually, because you cannot: you either click or you do not. What you do fade is the help around it, like luring with a treat. Karen Pryor writes it out like this: once a behaviour and its cue have become routine, you should stop clicking for that behaviour. Keep clicking at something he has known for ages and you only make the click worth less.

What takes its place is simply daily life. A nod, a scratch, saying something kind, the door that opens, being allowed in the car.

So the clicker does not go away, it moves. To the next thing he does not know yet.

With your voice it sits slightly differently. "Good" does keep running along, because it is not a device you pick up and put down. That is your way of saying something is right for the rest of his life.

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