Dog trainer Dawson left me with head buzzing about all the things I needed to re-work. We didn’t exactly have to start over; we just had to go back and tighten things up. Setting clearer goals was the first step.

Dawson recommended a great web site: Sue Ailsby’s site on dog training. Ailsby’s a longtime trainer from Canada who has developed very explicit levels for clicker training dogs, with competition as the goal. Since I have different goals for my cats than most people have for their dogs, the levels need some adapting. I’ve asked Sue for permission to use her levels as inspiration for tailoring our own curriculum.

For cats, Wendy Jeffries on the Yahoo group recommends starting with behaviors that have props, like the target stick and mat. First learned behaviors will be the animal’s default, so if you teach a cat to sit, you’ll get one that defaults to staying in place, making it harder to learn other behaviors.This made sense.

Inspired by the Yahoo list, I’d started with these:

Charge the clicker
Target
Go-to-mat
Come
Sit
Stay

I’d made Go-to-mat a priority so I could work with all three at a time, hoping to get us out of the bathroom as soon as we could. Come seemed a good early behavior to know, especially if any of them ever accidentally got outside. Sit seemed a good starting posture for other behaviors, like High Five and some version of Sit Up. Stay seemed like it would be part of the waiting game that came with Go-to-mat. Frankly, I hadn’t even thought about Down.

Ailsby’s dog curriculum has 7 Levels. Level 1 has these behaviors, in no particular order:

Come
Down
Sit
Target
Zen
Homework

Level 1 Come is a game played between 2 people and the dog, though the 20 foot distance she recommends is of course too far for beginning cats. Both Down and Sit are cued, with Down at 2 and Sit at 1. Neither ask for duration. Target is a hand target with 1 voice cue and Zen is leaving alone a treat in the hand for 5 seconds, 1 cue. Zen is teaching a dog to leave alone treats in the trainer’s hand. Go-to-mat doesn’t appear till Level 2, with 1 voice cue and no duration. Homework is for the human, a simpler version of this.

According to Ailsby’s list, we were at Level 2 for Target by using a stick, except for no voice cue to go with it. We were at Level 2 for Go-to-mat, with 1 voice cue but working on the duration of Level 3. Our version of Come at 3-5 feet for Moxie and the length of the bedroom, about 12 feet, for the boys isn’t even on her chart. Neither were our Sit, with voice plus hand cues, or Stay, with its, ahem, variable duration.

The other Levels remove cues and add duration for most of these behaviors, including combining Stays with other behaviors for Sit Stay and Down Stay. Some added behaviors, like Stand, Distance (a pole weave), Tricks (any), Retrieve and Jump, might be good ones for us to add. Others, like Leash Manners, Heel, Scenting and On the Road, may not ever be needed.

I realized the version of Go-to-mat I’d envisioned as the prerequisite for working them all together was several levels ahead of anything else. I was making it too hard on all of us! Along with moving even more slowly with that, it seemed like we needed to throw in some fun stuff, some Tricks, just to keep it more fun than work.

The new goals were shaking out to be:

Charge the clicker
Target
Come
Sit
Down
Down-Stay
Sit-Stay
Go-to-mat

And for fun:
Spin
High Five
Retrieve
Sit Up
Roll Over
Jump

Getting the behaviors is the easy part. Getting them to happen at 100% is next.