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Why do you need to deliver the treat so quickly after the click when just starting out? That is because scientific studies have proved that a reinforcement has to be delivered within a half second of a new behavior in order to have the maximum effectiveness.

When you are powering up the clicker, be certain that the click comes before the treat. Remember, we want the click to be sound that tells the dog that he is going to be getting a treat. If your dog has heard the click immediately before the treat many, many, times, what do you think the click predicts for your dog? A treat, of course! If your dog has heard the click after the treat many, many times, then what do you think the click predicts for your dog? Nothing! The click has to come before the treat to have any meaning for the dog.

Click and treat twenty times, twice a day for three days. By the end of the third day, I can guarantee you that your dog will get whiplash when he hears the click. That’s when you know the clicker is powered up.

Once the clicker is conditioned in this way, you will no longer need to get the treat to the dog so quickly. Now the clicker can serve as a bridge to mark the correct behavior with surgical precision, and then you can give the dog a treat in a relatively relaxed fashion. You need this kind of bridge to be an effective trainer.

What the clicker has allowed you to do is expand that ½ second of time between behavior and the reward into a few seconds by using the clicker as a bridge. You still want to try to click as soon as you can after the behavior occurs, but now the treat delivery can lag a few seconds. So long as the clicker is strongly powered up, the better the chance the dog will understand what he did to earn that treat. Without a bridge like a clicker, it is very difficult to make your dog understand what he is being rewarded for, and chances are you might end up reinforcing the wrong behavior. Take the example of sitting. You may think, if you feed within five seconds of your dog sitting, you have reinforced the sit. However, in the dog’s mind, he may have done at least four things in those intervening seconds between the sit and the treat. Here is what the list looks like in the dog’s mind:

1. Sit

2. Lick chops

3. Wag tail

4. Turn head away to the left

If you have not marked the “sit” with either a clicker or a verbal bridge (like “Yes!”), and you feed the dog after three seconds when he has just done number four, the head turn, what have you reinforced? Turning head away to the left! Can you see how, without a powerful marker that serves as a bridge, you may actually be training something other than you thought you were? Does this explain for you why sometimes your dog appears to perversely do something completely different than you have “trained” him to do?

The technical term for what you are doing in this section is “creating a conditioned reinforcer by using classical conditioning.” What a mouthful. All it really means is that you have taken something that has absolutely no meaning to the dog (the click) and paired it with something really good (the treat) again, and again, and again, and again, until the dog actually begins to equate the meaningless thing (the click) with the really great thing (the food). The result is that when the dog hears the conditioned reinforcer (the click) his body will actually respond as if food is present—the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and sends out signals for the dog to relax and feel happy in expectation of the food. Remember Pavlov and the dog who drooled when he heard the bell? That’s classical conditioning. So, once you have finished loading the clicker, you have the ability to reward you dog not just with food, but with a whole feeling of happiness and contentment. How cool is that?

How did you do on this exercise? Was it easy? Were you all thumbs? Don’t feel bad if you were. You will get much better at handling the clicker with just a little practice. I have a friend who, when she first started with the