Training. Look in nearly any book on cats…or dogs…and you’ll find that training equals obedience or discipline. In most cat training books, the very definition of training is to “prevent or discourage unwanted behavior.”
Clicker Training is a form of animal training that uses positive reinforcement almost exclusively. It’s more about teaching wanted behaviors than it is getting rid of unwanted ones, though those can be dealt with too. It really should be called Clicker Teaching.
The teacher lets the animal know it has done something correctly by marking the exact behavior with a click, then following immediately with a treat, the reinforcement. This is a form of operant conditioning: changing a behavior with a consequence.
Instead of commanding, or forcing, a cat to get a behavior, as in traditional animal training, Clicker Training gives the cat a cue…and the option of choosing whether or not to do it. The cat simply gets no reward if it doesn’t. As anyone knows who has ever lived with cats, cats respond much better to suggestion than to command.
The clicker streamlines communication with a consistent, easily recognized sound that becomes associated with the positive outcome of a treat. One theory suggests a click connects immediately with the same primitive part of the brain that acquires fear responses–except in a joyful way, not a fearful one. This can be a more powerful connection than just using hand or verbal commands.
Both the click and the treat can be faded to hand and verbal cues once the cat is consistently performing the behavior. Hand cues will always be stronger than verbal ones because cats are more visual.
Clicker Training has been around since the 1940’s, when B. F. Skinner developed his theories on behaviorism. It didn’t really take off in the larger animal training world until the early 1990’s. Clicker Training for cats started to spread at the end of the 1990’s, with a Yahoo group, books and websites.
