Falconry World

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Clicker training is especially useful for animals that cannot be taught using negative conditioning (try smacking a killers whales bum, go on i dare you)

Well today I started to train my English pointers using clicker training, the results were nothing short of amazing. I’m going to write a diary online of my experience of clicker training my dogs every day. Later on in the year I’ll apply this learning to my falconry.

For those of you that don’t know what clicker training is, here’s a quick run through. Clicker training is teaching through positive reinforcement. If you’ve ever learnt about Pavlos dogs when you were at school the technique uses some of the theory gained from his experiments. Pavlov discovered that by ringing a bell before placing down a bowl of food for a dog, the dog would begin to physically salivate before seeing the bowl of food just from hearing the bell.

This might not sound like much, but it shows that through repetition the dog physically demonstrated learning through an arbitrary sound, in this case a bell. Put simply the dog heard the bell and knew that food was imminent. This technique has been advanced to use a clicker, it could be any sound or visual cue, but through repetition the animal learns that on being given a cue, a reward is coming.

This cue can then be linked to an action that you want to encourage by clicking at the exact moment the behaviour is exhibited. The dog is standing you say sit. When eventually the dog starts to sit you click. The dog gets a reward. Again and again until you say sit the dog, without hesitation sits and receivers his reward.

For falconers, dog trainers, and any other animal trainer, this technique is used to pin point the exact moment the animal exhibits a behaviour he want to encourage. So with a Harris Hawk, you whistle the Harris hawk comes. With using this technique the Harris hawk doesn’t need to see the food on the fist, it simply needs to know it will get a reward because it has heard the cue, in this case a whistle.

Clicker training is great for falconers because we can only use positive conditioning on our birds. If a golden eagles mutes inside the house I’d like to see a falconer try and rub the eagles beak in the mute to teach it not to poop in the house….This is negative conditioning. If an animal does something wrong, like peeing in the house, it will result in a negative consequence, rubbing of nose in pee.

The dog first off learns that peeing is bad. It’s confused and the dog is isolated in the yard. It is probable that the isolation (the dog being taken away from you and placed outside) is more of a punishment than the rubbing of the nose. Hopefully the dog quickly puts together peeing outside equals praise from the owner (positive conditioning) and peeing in the house stops.

However negative conditioning takes more time and sometimes never works. In falconry we can only use positive conditioning. The bird flies high and up wind, we reward with food, the Harris hawk returns from the tree to a whistle, it is rewarded with food. The clicker or flashlight or anything else you want to use is simply a cue to let the animal know that at that exact moment, what it did was correct and will therefor receive a reward.

Tomorrow, I’ll start with what I did to get my two pointers to sit faster than they’ve ever done. It took about 20 mins and the dogs loved it.