Clicker Training

[Usagi5]

I’m going to try and start clicker training Usagi in a few weeks.  Has anyone tried this?  Do you have any tips or suggestions?

[Beka27]

Most everything is in the book. The only other thing I have to add is to try and use pellets (removed from the daily ration) as treats since they are small and “one-bite”. Another option is raisins cut into halves or thirds or matchstick carrots cut into teeny tiny pieces. The treat has to be one bite, other wise they will get distracted eating and lose focus. And speaking of focus, aim for just 5 minutes stretches of training time. Any longer is too long for a bunny, and you risk overfeeding treats.

[Elrohwen]

Beka has some good advice. I use pellets for most of my training since they’re small and healthy. Occasionally I’ll throw in a little bit of a craisin, but mine tend to lose focus when the really good treats come out.

Clickerbunny.com has some good tips as well.

One thing I was disagree with the standard instructions on is charging the clicker. Most instructions will tell you to click and treat for a while so the animal understands that click = treat. I don’t find this to speed things up with rabbits at all and mine clearly had no idea why I was clicking until they had more experience. I just jump right into training with the clicker. Eventually they figure out that the click has some meaning, but at first they are just responding to the reward. It’s pretty easy to start luring them into a standing position, for example, and click/treat when they do it. By the time they’re working on the second trick, they’ll really start to understand what that click means. Once they do get it, it’s really fun and training starts to go faster.

[Isabelle]

I did some with Dutchess, you have to have patience and repition. I tried to do five minute segments several times throughout the day, since after a few treats she’d get stubborn and just sit there waiting for the next treat instead of trying to get one by doing a trick

[Malp_15]

I had the same experience as Elrohwen, I did the click and treat for a long time trying to get Tait to understand the correlation (like I did with my dogs), but I found that just jumping into it worked better. I’ve only done periscoping and coming to his name so far. I need to start working on something else soon though because now whenever I pull out the treats he periscopes and if I don’t immediately give it to him he starts jumping up and down at my feet

[Usagi5]

Usagi gets unlimited pellets though because he had a severe malnourishment issue because I tried to switch him to only 1/4 cup and the vet thinks that his body just couldn’t handle that so now he’s back to unlimited pellets. Poor guy I will try using Crasins though, and I did get the pelletized oat hay from binkybunny so I will see if he likes those too. Thanks for the tips, I will go straight to training!

[wendyzski]

I did it with Winslet for a while – I used a cut-down old paintbrush as a target stick, and either a pellet of 1/4 of a craisin as a reward.  I already knew she was very smart*, so I wasn’t surprised to find that within a week of 5 minutes a day she learned “Up” and”spin” (both directions). 

 We got stuck on the next trick, because I wanted to try “over” to get her to jump over a stick, but since I live alone it was too complicated with the treat, the target stick, and the jumping stick – I ran out of hands.  I keep meaning to make either a hoop to jump through or a small obstacle, but life got in the way.  I still do “up” and “spin” a few times a week just so that she remembers.

 

*She learned on her own that the sound of my alarm clock meant that momma was getting up soon and that meant it was going to be pellet time!  I noticed that as soon as I turned off the alarm, I could hear happy running up and down the hallway in anticipation of my appearance

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