Recently, a married couple who are friends of mine adopted a puppy from SNIPSA; a 4-month-old black lab mix that they named Molé. I sent them a new puppy gift: a clicker training book and two clickers ...

In her new book, Reaching the Animal Mind ($25, Scribner), Karen Pryor offers a lively, wide-ranging overview of the use of operant conditioning for training, well, nearly any animal you can think of.

Clicker training is based on creating a special reward of this nature. Technically it involves the classical conditioning of emotions. After all, it is not the actual piece of food that we use as a ...

I recently was a witness to a rather heated argument between two dog trainers about the relative effectiveness of "clicker training" compared to "marker training." After much noise and hand waving, it ...