Clicker Train Your Own Assistance Dog

Purpose: To help you learn how to clicker train your own assistance dog.

About this Course: There is no single cloak to be woven from the many threads in this train your own assistance dog course. It does not focus on demonstrating completed or polished tasks. Rather, the focus is on the ingredients – the behaviors the dog must know in order to construct tasks, lots of tasks. Assistance dogs serve individuals with such diverse disabilities that no single educational tool could encompass all the steps for creating finished assistance dog tasks – to serve the full range of disabilities. The specific tasks often need careful tailoring to individual teams, and differ with variables like the relative size of dog to the handler.

Instructor: Barbara Handelman, M.Ed, CDBC

Access: Once you purchase the course, you can begin watching the video modules immediately and as many times as you want.  You will have access forever.

Prerequisites:

• The trainer should have a working familiarity with clicker training basics and the essential tenets of canine learning theory.
• The dog should have the essential “obedience” skills such as: sit, down, stay, and come, as well as being both comfortable and safe working off lead. All of these behaviors should be on cue, before attempting to train the complex skills that will later become the foundation of assistance dog tasks.

Content of the Course: 

Verbatim scripts for the entire program are included in the handouts.  This will facilitate accessibility for people who are deaf. People who are blind my have the pdf files translated into Braille.

You will learn –

• Clicker Training
• Hand targeting
• Shaping
• The “Four D’s”
• Teaching a dog to “touch”
• Teaching a dog to “push” with her nose and paw
• Position changes such as:
  • Backing up
  • Paws up
  • Under
  • Circle Behind
  • Changing sides
  • Follow
  • Turn around
  • Going away
  • 360 degree turns in place
  • Pulling off clothing
  • Solid “Stand Stay”
• Targeting and Retrieve
  • Shaping a retrieve
  • Retrieving “mine”
  • Retrieving item by name
  • Behavior chain: Find Keys
  • Scent discrimination
  • Signaling on a found object
• Self-Control Exercises
• Going to remote targets
• Shaping to push buttons, switches
• Push to close a door
• Working with handicapped access doors
• Pulling to open a door
• Vans and car doors
• Waiting at doors and gates
• Ringing to “go out”
• Temperament evaluations for assistance dog skills