Booking Form www.bit.ly/gary-wilkes
Come and join us for 2 days with Gary Wilkes. www.clickandtreat.com
Rather than a simplistic single-minded view, Gary Wilkes provides a balanced and broad perspective on controlling your dog’s behaviour. From competitive obedience to working dogs, dogs with neurological disorders or just dealing with a rowdy pet, this information will sharpen and polish your knowledge of dog behavior and allow you to realize your dog’s full potential.
Come to this hands-on seminar and find out how to use the solutions from one discipline to solve problems in another. Broad Band Training Seminars will show you how to teach accurate and reliable behaviors without losing your dog’s spirit.
Bio: Gary Wilkes has more than 35 years working with animals – 8 in the humane industry in every capacity other than executive director. He has worked for the last 30 years as a behaviourist and trainer working with everything from dogs with neurological disorders, serious aggression and especially top performance working and competition dogs. Gary created clicker training for dogs between 1987-1992. When Gary and Karen Pryor introduced clicker training to dog trainers, he had already clicker trained more than 1,000 dogs, primarily by veterinary referral. Now that number is around 7,500 plus and growing. His consultant list includes MIT, The Seeing Eye, US Army Special Ops Dog Training Command, search and rescue groups, service dog training schools and many others. His focus is always on top-level performance with working and competition dogs. He has years more experience using clicker training at the highest levels of difficulty than anyone else. If he makes a definitive statement it’s the result of direct experience over many years with many dogs. i.e. It’s not speculation. You can take it to the bank.
Topics: ¨ The Basis of Learning — Connecting Behaviors to Consequences: The purpose of the clicker is to create precise connections between well-defined behaviors and predictable consequences. This simple but powerful tool can dramatically improve your ability to control your dog’s performance.
¨ Strategies for Building New Behaviors – Getting the Behavior to Happen: Unlike theoretical images of operant conditioning, clicker training takes a proactive view of creating new behaviors. Learning to use free-standing and moving targets will allow you to rapidly develop behaviors, rather than waiting around for something to happen.
¨ Commands and Signals — How to attach commands to behaviors: Perhaps the weakest link in most behavioral control is the development of cues that consistently trigger acceptable behavior. The basic principles that govern commands and signals are quickly learned and easily applied. Learning to offer your dog consistent patterns will rapidly improve his responsiveness to your requests.
¨ Controlling Behavioral Variability — Repeat vs. Variable, the essence of learning vs. performance: Modern education focuses almost exclusively on learning to repeat patterns. Teaching new behaviours requires an animal to intentionally deviate, over a series of repetitions. These functionally opposite tasks must be integrated into your training program or rapid learning and consistent performance cannot coexist. Learning to control how behaviours remain the same and when they are supposed to change is the key to a powerful clicker training program.
¨ Building a dependable repertoire — Integrating new behaviours into a dog’s current bag of tricks: When you have created a new behavior, such as “down,” you will invariably get more of it than you want. If you ask for “sit,” you will most likely get “down”. Ask for “roll over” and you’ll still get “down.” Ask for an aspirin, you will once again get “down”, “down” and more “down.” Dogs are certainly not one-trick ponies, but they are more accurately styled as “new trick” ponies who tend to offer the behavior that has been reinforced most heavily, most recently. A proper knowledge of clicker training includes taking all the behaviors in a dog’s repertoire and creating a balance that allows you to get the behaviour you want, when you want it.
¨ Troubleshooting and maintenance — Polishing behaviour to make it stick and fixing it when it breaks: Using primarily positive reinforcement allows for deviation. Over time, any behavior will start to fluctuate, wander, decay or entirely disappear. Depending on the type of behaviour, your strategy for repairing it may not be as simple as merely repeating your original shaping techniques. Appreciating how to repair and maintain behaviour is as important as creating the behaviours in the first place and an integral part of behavioral control.
¨ Teaching Reliable Inhibitions: This seminar will include a logical and rational discussion of the use of aversive control in dog training and behaviour modification and how to do it safely, effectively and humanely.
¨ Controlling Behaviour Problems: Gary Wilkes has spent more than 25 years defining, refining and perfecting practical applications in settings as diverse as Delta Force War dogs, animals with neurological disorders and thousands of pet dogs with one foot three feet in a shelter and barely staying in the home. Bring your case histories and it’s all fair game.
Please email info@shiptonevents.co.uk with any enquiries.
Cost is £300 for a working dog place and £160 for an audit place. This is a small workshop with only 6 working places available and a limited number of audit spots. Payment details on the booking form www.bit.ly/gary-wilkes
