Training My Dog

I found the part about schedules of reinforcement and about animal training in the chapter relate to my life. Me and my mom have recently been trying to train my dog Bosco to do basic tricks like sit and shake and lay down and roll over and every time he does the trick right we give him a little treat as a positive reinforcement. I find it interesting that the book says to only give the dog a treat some of the time. This does seem true though because unless Bosco knows we have a treat for him, he rarely will do the trick we want him to because he knows there's no reward. If we used partial reinforcement, he would be more likely to do his tricks all the time. Before reading this from the book my cousin told me about partial reinforcement at Christmas because he just got a dog and was showing us all the cool tricks his dog could do and told us how he was training his dog and such. We all thought it was silly to only give the dog a treat some of the time, but it makes sense now and I believe him after reading it in the book. We also watched a video on clicker training and talked about it in class and just a few weeks ago we watched one of my other cousin's dogs for them when they went out of town for the weekend and they gave us a clicker that had a "bad" noise and a "good" noise for their dog Murphy. I thought it was so random and weird that they wanted us to use it on him, like when he barked we were supposed to give him the "bad" noise and when he did something good then we gave him the "good" noise. I was really surprised to find that it worked amazingly well. Whenever he was barking a lot we would simply pressed the bad noise and he would immediately stop.