Clicker Training Project

For my clicker training project I used my friends cat Reggie, who is a 4 year old Domestic Short Hair, neutered male. Throughout the training, I didn't do a lot of sessions outside for new learning techniques due to the fact that Reggie tends to get distracted especially from other people and animals. It also seemed that smaller, quieter places, like inside the barn, allowed Reggie to focus easier on my cues. Food as well as praise tends to be a huge motivator for Reggie so changing his rewards sometimes allowed him to stay focused on the task at hand. The issue with this was that some weeks he would be doing really well learning the commands and techniques but the next week he refused to learn or do anything. Reggie and I did the clicker training for about 5 weeks. In the beginning, we were training about 4 days a week and maybe 30 minutes a day. As the training continued we changed the sessions to 3 days a week, but for 20-30 minutes a day. The primary reinforcers that I used with him was 9 Lives soft cat …show more content…
This session seemed to be the most important for Reggie especially since he started a week late. This was due to the fact that the first cat I was training was unable to finish the clicker training. Reggie had never been associated with the clicker so the first few times he seemed confused and didn't want anything to do with it. Clicker conditioning is where a secondary reinforcer (clicker) is paired with a primary reinforcer (soft cat treats). This signals to Reggie that he's doing the correct behavior. With the free shaping part of the lesson he at first was confused, but after a while he understood that I wanted his free shaping to be “look”. Free shaping is considered building a new behavior by selecting an existing behavior and reinforcing that behavior to increase or strengthen