30 JulEpisode 18 | The Dog Training Triad Part 3: Timing
So, you have a carefully engineered environment (see: The Dog Training Triad Part 1: Management) where your dog is likely to do lots of things you want him to to do, and you have also selected really appropriate rewards (see: The Dog Training Triad Part 2: Rewards). Now what? you need to make sure your rewards are being given with really excellent TIMING!
Dogs are doing things constantly, and concurrently. Behaviors are overlapping at every moment, and a dog may sometimes think a reward is for something other than what you thought it was for. In this episode, Annie explains how to deliver rewards with A+ timing by using a "marker" signal, like a clicker.
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Transcript:
**music**
Annie:
Hello, humans, Annie here. I have got to tell you that I am pretty excited because this episode is the third in the three part series about the dog training triad, as I call it. I think of the triad as basically like a universal recipe that you can train any animal to do almost anything that you want, that of course they are physically capable of doing. And this recipe is not species specific. I really believe it can work on all animals. Of course it is individualized from one individual to another. And I can't tell you the specific ingredients you're going to need to train your individual student, but it's kind of like baking bread. There's like a basic recipe for making bread, and then you can riff on it from there. So if you can really grasp this training triad, I think you're about half way to figuring out how to train whatever it is you want to train.
I say about half, because I do think there are three other really important factors to dog training. I think you have to understand operant conditioning. I think you have to understand classical conditioning. And I think you have to develop the ability to read some basic dog body language. And those are basically the big pillars. So we have the training triad and then we have operant conditioning, aka learning by consequence. Classical conditioning aka Pavlovian conditioning or learning by association and then dog body language. And we've talked about those latter three things in some previous episodes. And I will go into more detail about all those three things in future episodes, don't you worry. But if you've listened to the first two parts of this series, and now you're onto this third and final one about the dog training triad, give yourself a pat on the back or pat on the head or wherever you like to be pat, because you are well on your way to becoming an excellent dog trainer.
So first part of the dog training triad, which we spoke about is management-setting the stage for your dog to succeed. Management I think of as everything that we can basically do from the outside in, in order to control behaviors and to make sure that we're going to get lots of behaviors we want and reduce the likelihood that we're going to get behaviors that we don't want from the get go.
Then we talked about rewards, which is kind of aka reinforcers, but I talked about the difference between rewards and reinforcers technically, but you know, basically you have this really well set up road. I call it like you have sort of your yellow brick road, where your dog wants to be, is psyched to be your dog is not going to be interested in veering off the path because your dog doesn't even know there's anything beyond the path. You have this super well set up managed environment. And how are you then going to communicate to your dog that you like all the things he or she is doing on this road- you are going to reward those behaviors. So we talked about how to select rewards, different kinds of rewards, food rewards, real life rewards, et cetera.
So now we're onto the third part of the triad, which is timing. Once you have your really well set up environment and you've chosen your appropriate rewards to reward behaviors that you like, you want to make sure that you are giving these rewards with really excellent, thoughtful timing.
Now, the reason that I use the word thoughtful is because it's important to think about rewarding behaviors that you want to encourage. A big misconception of this,kind of, what's often called reward-based training is that we're just throwing cookies at dogs. And there are certainly times where you will probably reward your dog for nothing in particular. Not every single good thing you give to your dog is necessarily going to be specifically designed to reinforce a desired behavior. That said you will be reinforcing behaviors you like whenever you are rewarding your dog and so you want to think about what those rewards will be getting you.
When people refer to a dog who is spoiled, or a kid who is spoiled or anyone who's spoiled to me, that means they're their recipient of a lot of rewards that just aren't given with good timing. You know, it's not like spoiled kids received gifts and non-spoiled kids never received gifts. Of course, all kids can receive gifts and not all of them are going to become spoiled, but it's the willy nilly tossing of treats at a kid or at a dog with no intended purpose ever can, in my opinion, lead to some undesirable personality traits.
I'm thinking about a girl I grew up with who got a new car when she turned 16, but she pitched a fit because it didn't have a CD player in it. So her father drove it back to the dealer, got the same car with a CD player in it and brought it back to her. So the behavior of having a tantrum was reinforced.
And I think it is not hard to get into the habit of reinforcing dogs for doing things we don't necessarily like simply by not paying much attention to the timing with which we give rewards. A simple example might be rewarding your dog for peeing by giving them a treat when you come inside. Unless that pee happened at precisely the moment when you were coming inside, you have most likely reinforced the behavior of coming inside, not the behavior of peeing, which brings us to the next point.
Like I said, you want your rewards to be given with thoughtful timing and also excellent timing. You want to make sure that you are delivering your rewards right away. The good news is that good dog trainers have figured out how to make it really easy to make sure that your rewards are delivered with really good timing.
Now, could you pop a treat into your dog's mouth very second, that your dog’s butt hits the ground when you're teaching a “sit?” Maybe, but it would be pretty difficult delivering a food reward or really any kind of reward at the exact moment that your dog is doing whatever it is that you want him or her to be doing can be especially difficult if you're working with an animal who is not physically right near you. And like I said, this recipe while it has nuances from one individual to another, it's generally not species specific, we are using techniques that largely work with all kinds of animals.
So the solution to perfect timing of treat delivery, that dog trainers use actually comes from the world of dolphin training. And actually believe that if you can take a moment to really think about how dolphins are trained, you can see how delivering a reward with great precision can be difficult because you can't really touch a dolphin during most kinds of training. And usually the trainer is next to the pool or whatever body of water the dolphin is. And the dolphin is in the water. So imagine a situation where say, you're trying to teach a dolphin to swim through a hoop, and you have the dolphin playing with his friends. He does a jump. He then does swim through the hoop. He comes over to the side of the pool and there you are, the trainer you give the dolphin, the fish.
If you consider that situation from the dolphin’s point of view, you can see that he might think he's being rewarded for playing with his friends or doing a jump or going through the hoop maybe or swimming up to the trainer. There were a whole bunch of things that happened in the sequence of moments before he got his fish. Now with enough repetitions, maybe the dolphin would figure out, “oh, you know, I think it's this hoop swimming thing that is, what's getting me the reward,” but that's not a very efficient way to train. In order to speed up the learning process. The dolphin trainer blows a whistle the moment that the dolphin is in the hoop. Again, it would be nearly impossible to deliver the fish to the dolphin the moment the dolphin is in the hoop. But the dolphin here is the whistle and the dolphin has learned to associate the sound of that whistle with getting a fish.
That whistle is called a marker. And it's an example of a secondary reinforcer or a conditioned reinforcer, which I talked a little bit about in the last episode. A secondary reinforcer or a conditioned reinforcer is any kind of reward that you had to learn to enjoy that you were not born knowing about. I think of a marker, kind of, as a way of saying you've given me something I want, and now I'm going to give you something you want. And of course we have secondary reinforcers or conditioned reinforcers in human life as well, all over the place. And often they are also used as markers.
An example would be getting your paycheck at the end of the week. Of course, the timing there is important. You're not getting it before the work week starts, you're, I hope, not getting it six months after the work week ended, you get it at the end of the week. And it's a secondary reinforcer, the paycheck is in that it has representative value, the piece of paper, in and of itself, doesn't have meaning that you were born knowing about, but you can use it to get all the kinds of things do need to live, be it food or pay rent or whatever. And it's just a lot more convenient and effective than your boss showing up with a gallon of gasoline for you at the end of the week, or with bags of groceries for you at the end of the week.
All you have to do to condition a reinforcer is pair it repeatedly with a primary reinforcer. You, or your animal that you're training, you have to know that it's always backed up by something. If some of the time your check was not actually backed up by the money, if you went to the bank and the teller was like, “sorry, no can do.” If some of the time that dolphin heard the whistle and got to the side of the pool and there was no fish, the marker would lose its meaning.
So consistency is important, but it's very easy to forge the connection between any kind of secondary reinforcer that you're going to use as a marker and the primary reinforcer, which is going to be whatever your animal enjoys that your animal did not need to learn to enjoy food, play, attention-those are the big primary reinforcers that we tend to use. Sex and sleep are also a primary reinforcers, but harder to use in most kinds of dog training, at least.
So with dogs in training, we tend to use a clicker as a marker. A clicker is a little hand held device that makes a sharp noise. This is what it sounds like. (CLICK SOUND) And there's actually a direct line from the development of using a clicker with dogs from the training of dolphins that really began to take off in the 1960s. And this is largely thanks to a woman named Karen Pryor, who is one of my training heroes and also the founder of the Karen Pryor Academy of animal training and behavior, which is the school I went to to become a professional dog trainer.
In the early 1960s, I believe, it was Karen's then husband, Tap Pryor, bought a marine park in Hawaii and he enlisted Karen to train the dolphins that he imagined would do the live shows, which people go to these kinds of parks to see. It was called Sea Life Park. I think it's still actually there in Oahu Hawaii.
Anyway, Karen really didn't know anything about animal training. At the time, she was actually a breastfeeding expert. She had written a very popular book called Nursing your baby, which she's still well known for. But she had a dog that she had kind of trained and I think maybe she had sort of trained a horse and she was the only one at Sea Life Park who seemed to have any ounce of confidence at all, that she could figure out how to train dolphins to do tricks.
So Karen somehow got her hands on notes that had been written by Keller Breland, a man who had been a graduate student of BF Skinner at the University of Minnesota in the 1940s and Skinner, at this time, was really creating the entire field of behavior analysis and codifying operant conditioning. He was really one of the first, if not, perhaps the first behaviorist and he and his graduate students, they were doing all kinds of fascinating experiments with operant conditioning, largely with rats and pigeons, I believe. And I'll put some clips in the show notes, but they were doing things like teaching pigeons to read. They were hired by the government for a project that was known as Project Pigeon, which involved training pigeons and, this is amazing, training pigeons to guide missiles kind of like the original drone pilots. And he had, and his students actually did succeed at training pigeons to guide missiles, kamikaze pigeons, to guide missiles with great accuracy, although the project never went forward for a bunch of reasons. I've written about this before, and yes, I will also put more about Project Pigeon in the shownotes. Fascinating stuff.
Anyway, Keller Breland and his wife, Marian Breland, who was also a student of BF Skinner's took what they were learning in his lab, studying operant conditioning and applied it to teaching animals, to do all kinds of crazy things for amusement parks, for circus shows for TV commercials. Their company was called Animal Behavior Enterprises.
And in their work in the lab, they saw how important it was to have some kind of consistent marker to let the animal that they were working with know that they had done something right and that a treat was forthcoming. I think the marker that they used most in the lab was a light. And you can certainly use a light as a marker in dog training too, but they ended up with the animals that they were training for Animal Behavior Enterprises, which was their company, they ended up picking up one of these little sound makers, a clicker, which used to be sold, and I think are still sold at like party stores, sort of little noisemakers, I feel like I remember getting this kind of thing and goody bags when I was a kid. And they were certainly, uh, even bigger back when they were working, which I think was in the fifties. They figured out that this little handheld noise maker made an excellent marker for training all kinds of animals.
So Karen read Keller Breland’s guide to training animals based on what he had learned in Skinner's lab and what he was doing at Animal Behavior Enterprises. And she thought, “huh, I think that's the answer. That's what I need to let these dolphins know exactly what they've done correctly. Because by the time they swim over to the side of the pool to get their fish too much time has passed and I am not able to communicate with them precisely about what it is they did that I wanted them to do.” Instead of a clicker with dolphins, she chose to use a whistle.
But about 20 or 30 years after that, she decided that there needed to be a change in dog training and that so much of what she was doing with dolphins would be applicable to what dog trainers were trying to do with pet dogs.So when showing her methods to dog trainers, she went back to using the little handheld clicker that Marian and Keller Breland had suggested and clickers are still used by trainers throughout the world.
Now you do not have to use a clicker. In fact, I often use a word as a marker instead of a clicker. I usually say the word, “yes.” Some trainers say the word, “good.” I think any word that is short, really one syllable is best it could be said quickly, and clearly will generally do the job. But it's important to remember that the word or the click is not praise. It is not really the reward in and of itself all though it is a secondary reinforcer, it has to be backed up by something.
Sometimes clients say, “well, I say “good boy” when my dog does something good,” but to me that kind of praise, unless you have conditioned the words “good boy” to the point where the words in and of themselves are like a hundred dollar bill, those words need to be backed up by something.
Now a clicker I should say will generally work better than a word, but I think it's a good idea to get used to using both a word and a clicker as markers because you're not always necessarily going to have a clicker on you and I find that the more training that you do with a dog, the more savvy the dog will become at learning and you won't necessarily need the major precision that a clicker gives you.
I actually usually avoid calling this kind of training “clicker training” because the clicker is simply a tool. It isn't compulsory. It would be like calling, writing- pencil moving. There are lots of ways to write. You don't necessarily need a pencil. There are lots of ways to use a marker, lots of different kinds of markers you can use, the clicker is just one of them. But what's nice about the clicker is it's a very sharp sound that is pretty unlike anything else your dog has ever going to hear in his or her daily life. It's consistent. It's emotionless in a way that words are not necessarily emotionless, and it's also the same no matter who is using the clicker. If both you and your spouse and your kids are all training the dog, the clicker is going to remain a constant. Whereas if each of you is saying “yes,” the yes is, of course, going to sound a little bit different based on who's saying it.
In her book, Reaching the Animal Mind, Karen Pryor actually also talks about how studies are showing that the very sharp sound of the clicker is processed by the amygdala, which is like the reptilian part of the brain, the oldest part of the brain. And it's processed there faster than anything else in any other part of the brain could be processed and produces just this sort of natural, happy burst of chemicals in the brain. And I see it with my dog when we're doing clicker training. He gets this, kind of like, psyched look almost like glazed-over, stoned eyes. And it makes sense because, you know, I think we also respond to sharp high pitch sounds in a certain way. And the powers that be that are training us all the time, take that into consideration. I've been doing Duo Lingo. It's a language learning app and when you get something right in Duo Lingo, there's a kind of a “ba bum” sound. Or if you're playing slots at the casino, right, the sound you hear isn't “good job, you have won.” It's high pitched, it's a beat, it's quick. And those kinds of sounds do on a very basic level, produce certain kinds of feelings.
Now it's important that the marker you're using always be followed by a reward and not be presented concurrently with the reward, otherwise it will become meaningless. An example of this in human life would be when the elevator door opens. First you hear the ding, then the door opens. It's a signal that lets you know what's about to happen and if it happened concurrently with the door opening, it wouldn't be as useful or noticeable probably even. Same thing with a check, if you got the check at the same time that you got the money, the check represented the check would have no meaning, no reason for existence.
When I use a marker, like a clicker, in training, I think of it like the shutter of a camera- capturing the moment that the behavior I want has occurred. It's like a pinpointing tool that highlights a very specific moment in time. And capturing a behavior with a marker is how we teach most behaviors from the beginning. If I want to teach a dog to “sit,” for example, I am literally going to wait for the dog to sit and then click or “yes”, when the dog sits and follow that with a treat and repeat.
I have an episode I'm working on that I will post in the near future. That really goes into the nitty gritty of how to teach a “sit” using, capturing, using a marker. But that's basically where you start out. You can capture a behavior with a marker when you're trying to teach something specific like a sit, in which case you're going to be marking that behavior ideally a whole bunch of times in quick succession, but sometimes you can also use a clicker or marker word just to encourage any behavior that you like.
Sometimes I'll suggest to clients to try and click or use a marker to reward 30 behaviors a day. Just picking anything that they like that the dog has done and rewarding it with a marker followed by a food reward or some other primary reward in order to encourage the likelihood that those behaviors are going to happen again. Even if the behavior is just sitting cutely by the sofa or an adorable head tilt or maybe they're even using a marker to reinforce the absence of a behavior. Is your dog not barking when there's a sound in the hallway? Well, you could click and treat that. What you're doing. As I think of it as kind of helping your dog create a photo album of lots of things that the human likes.
We tend to think dogs probably think in pictures, so it really is kind of like a photo album that they can reference later. “You know, sometimes when I'm just sitting quietly by the door and not doing anything, I get clicked and treated. Sometimes when there's a sound in the hallway and I make eye contact with my owner rather than a barking, I get clicked and treated.” And the more little moments like that that you can reinforce, the more you're helping your dog color in a picture of what you want them to be doing with their time.
Now I just wanted to mention a couple times when you might use a clicker a little bit differently or not at all during training. First of all, sometimes, and this doesn't happen that often, but it does happen sometimes I will click and treat a dog and I keep saying click-your click could be a “yes” I kind of use the term click as to mean a marker, but sometimes I will click a click and treat a dog just to keep a dog in the game. If a dog is losing interest, if I've maybe raised criteria too quickly when I'm teaching something, if my rate of reinforcement just hasn't been high enough, it's really important to keep your rate of reinforcement really high, especially when you're training something new or something difficult. Sometimes I will just click anything. Sometimes it can just be kind of a way to reset the game
In her book, Don't shoot the Dog, Karen Pryor has an anecdote I really like about when she was a kid, one time, she was just kind of in a funk and feeling kind of disconnected from her family and out of the blue her stepmother gave her a bunch of vouchers for horseback riding lessons and that it just totally changed her attitude. And I think it's kind of a good exception to the rule of always wanting to reward good behavior or behaviors that we want every now and then it's okay to give something for nothing, I think, with the intention of just getting your student’s buy in.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that whenever you are working at training that involves forging an association, training that is rooted in classical conditioning, aka Pavlovian conditioning, you don't generally need a marker signal. Take Pavlov's dogs for example. Pavlov rang a bell, his dogs got food, he rang a bell, his dogs got food, eventually the dogs just started salivating when they heard the bell, as we all know. But that was training that happened thanks to the association that they made between the sound of the bell and the food. There was no specific thing the dogs were doing that caused the food to arrive or the salvation to happen. There was no specific thing to be marked.
So let's say I am trying to get my dog used to the sound of a skateboard. I can just play the sound of the skateboard and give my dog treats and I can play the sound of the skateboard and give my dog treats. There's not really a need for a clicker there because there's not a behavior that I'm trying to pinpoint. I'm just trying to forge an association.
Now, often I find when people learn about using a marker signal, especially if they're coming to a positive reinforcement based training from a background in other kinds of training, they will ask, “well, can I use the marker to pinpoint behaviors I don't like and then follow those with some kind of a primary punisher?”And my answer is “yes, you could do this. People do do this, but for a variety of reasons I don't recommend it.”
Now an example of how people do this, if you use a shock collar with a dog, often the collar will beep or vibrate before it shocks the dog. And unlike when you're using a conditioned reinforcer, like a clicker that always has to be backed up by something good, if you have a secondary or conditioned punisher that has sometimes been followed by a primary punisher- so the secondary punisher conditioned punisher would be like the vibration or the beep and then the primary punisher is the shock. You actually don't have to always back it up because just the fear that sometimes the shock follows the vibration or the beep is usually effective enough.
Now I should say, if you are going to use punishment and training, I think it is a good idea to be as precise as you can with the timing of that punishment. But like I always say, the big reason why I don't like using punishment and training is because you have to have behaviors you don't like to punish to begin with if you're using punishment. And I think that with good dog training, we can usually control the situation well enough and reinforce enough incompatible behaviors, we can usually create situations where we're not going to get lots of behaviors we don't like, so then we don't have behaviors we have to punish.
But the other major reason I don't suggest using punishment and training is, of course, we never know what associations the dog is going to make with the punishment. So you think you've punished the dog for peeing on the rug and even if you caught the dog at the exact moment, the dog was peeing on the rug, the dog might think that he's being punished for peeing in front of you or for being on this side of the room or for any other thing, which because we don't have verbal communication, we can't even know.
And the same thing applies if you're using a secondary punisher. It's impossible to know what associations your dog is making with that marker signal because there's never just one thing happening at any moment ever.
And of course this goes with using a marker, like we use a clicker to reinforce. If I click my dog for sitting at the curb, that click is ostensibly for the moment the butt hits the ground, but it's really taking a snapshot of everything that's going on. So I'm not just clicking the “sit”, I'm clicking being on the street corner, I'm clicking being on a leash near me, I'm clicking the motorcycle that's driving by. I'm clicking and kind of taking a snapshot for the dog of everything in the environment and communicating to the dog all of this is good. So the danger of using a marker and following it with a punisher is that you are inadvertently creating associations with lots of things you might not even be perceiving and those associations, usually fear-based associations, could lead to problems down the line.
So if you want to try using a clicker or a word like “yes” or any other kind of marker with your dog, you can start right away. Some trainers suggest, what's called loading the clicker where you're going to click and then give a treat and then click and then give a treat or say the word “yes”, and then give a treat and say the word “yes”, and give a treat until your dog makes that association. I quite frankly don't usually do that because I find once I just start training with a marker, be it a clicker or a yes. The dog tends to understand very quickly what the marker means.
So if you have a clicker, what you're going to do is you're going to put it in your nondominant hand and I would also put a bunch of treats in your nondominant hand already broken up and just to practice your timing and to give your dog a first exercise in clicker training- what I want you to do is then hold two fingers on your dominant hand right in front of your dog's nose. I usually use my middle finger and my pointer finger. And the second that your dog investigates your fingers with his nose, which he probably will do because if you put something in front of your dog's face, that's generally what they do. The second he sniffs your fingers, even just a little bit, you are going to click with the thumb that's holding the clicker in your nondominant hand and then you are going to take the hand your dog just touched and you're going to reach into that stash of treats that you're holding along with the clicker and give one little bit to your dog. And then repeat.
An alternative exercise you can do just to start playing with this notion of precise timing in your training and capturing is download an app on your iPhone or iPad called Doodle Buddy. And at the bottom of the Doodle Buddy app you'll see an option to pick a stamp. There's a little stamp symbol, so go ahead and choose one. I usually like the heart one or a smiley face one. And then put your phone or your iPad or whatever either put it on the floor or hold it in your hand, right up to your dog's nose and put a treat on it or smear a little bit of peanut butter on it, f you don't mind getting her your phone a little bit dirty, and when your dog goes to eat this treat, it's going to activate the stamp feature on Doodle Buddy and it's going to make like “bringgg” noise and then you are going to give another treat. So the “bringgg” noise is going to become a conditioned reinforcer that is going to be marking or capturing the precise moment when your dog's nose touches the screen.
And if you do this a few times, you won't have to put a treat on the screen or peanut butter on the screen. Your dog is going to figure out, “you know, I hear that noise when I touch my nose to the screen and then that's always followed by a treat. So let me figure out how I can make that noise.” So I think that's just sort of a fun beginner exercise to help get the feel of using a conditioned reinforcer as a marker to train something new. And because your dog is kind of clicking himself by using his nose, it takes a little bit of the work out of it and you walk away with a drawing done by your dog.
So I really hope this series on the training triad has been helpful. Something special for you guys, through August 31st if you leave a review on iTunes, then take a screenshot and email it to podcasts@schoolforthedogs.com and put the word “clicker” in the subject line and send your mailing address along with it in the body of the email, I will send you a clicker.
There are lots of different kinds of clickers out there. And the one I'm going to send you is a particularly soft- sounding clicker. It's very lightweight, fits easily into your pocket. I really like it a lot. So all you need to do is between now and the end of August, screenshot your review on iTunes and email it along with your mailing address and the word clicker and the subject line to podcast@schoolforthedogs.com.
Which brings us to our Woof Shout Out of the Day which goes to Melinda of West Islip New York. Melinda is an aspiring dog trainer. She also fosters dogs through the nonprofit Mr Bones and Co. She has a beautiful gray pit bull named Shea and Melinda left the nicest review on iTunes. She wrote,
“I love a well-produced podcast and music is original and quirky. The voice recording is clear in the content as well put together. This is a podcast that leaves me with no further questions and he picks a topic and takes a deep dive into the origin’s history. The societal relevance, discusses root causes and explains the jargon filled field of animal behavior and training into concepts we can understand. The information is well researched which can be difficult in an unregulated field. The arrangement of information provided in each episode is well thought out and flows like a New York Times the daily podcast.Thank you. “
Thank you Melinda. That was certainly a nice bit of positive reinforcement to receive. The behavior of me recording this podcast has certainly been encouraged.
Also encouraging is that we have our very first sponsor. I mentioned them at the beginning of the show, SaneBox. I've been using SaneBox for about four years to organize my email. Recently I met a tenured professor at a very fancy university who told me that one of the perks of her jobs is that she has an assistant who all she does is organize her email. And I thought, “gosh, I'm not a tenured professor at any fancy university. And I have an assistant organized, that's my email. It's called SaneBox.” So basically you sign up with SaneBox and then they do some kind of magic to your email that I don't quite understand, but it figures out what emails in your inbox are just not that important. Not like spam, unimportant, but not like high-level importance. So like newsletters, coupons, social media updates, receipts, that kind of thing. and it puts it all into its own special folder and then once a day SaneBox emails you a digest of everything that's in that folder so you can look at it all in one place and it just saves so much time because you don't spend the first 10 minutes of every day going through your inbox deleting stuff.
I am truly a big fan of the service and you can try it yourself. You can get a two week free trial plus a $15 coupon towards your first month when you sign up at schoolforthedogs.com/sane.
Special thanks to Danielle Kales and the Energy Commission for letting me use their really cool version of Time is on my Side.
Fun Dog Fact of the Day. Did you know that the clicker was used during the World War II D day invasion into Normandy? They called it a cricket and paratroopers used it to identify other American soldiers when they landed on the beach in the dark. One click meant “who are you?” and if you clicked back twice, it meant that you were a friend, not a foe.
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