Charging the mark
 

Hello!

I've finally brought Talos home, and although I'm not worried about command training yet, I have begun engagement training and charging the mark (which for now is a clicker, but will be a marker word later).

I fully believe in starting a puppy on training as soon as possible, but I'm not wanting to push him and confuse him too early, so we'll work on actually doing things later.

My question is, how long did it take your puppy to understand the click/mark? It's only been two days, I know, and we have small sessions of about 2 or 3 minutes of me just click--> treat with no expectations, but I'm wondering about how long it takes for them to actually get it so I don't start freaking out down the line. Thanks!

I actually don't bother charging the clicker before using it with a new puppy. What I do instead is click/treat whenever puppy does something I like and want to encourage - looking at me, coming towards me, laying down on the floor, etc. It doesn't take any time at all for them to figure out that the click = a treat, and to start offering up those behaviors with greater frequency. If you use attention to charge the clicker, it's basically a two-fer. He learns the association, and he's also being reinforced for focusing on you.

Even if you do it the usual way and charge the clicker before actually using it, I would think a few days of several short sessions should be sufficient.

I have just done 2-3 sessions of "charging." at maybe a minute each. My goal was 30 treats per minute.
Then I started using it for name=attention, and capturing behaviors like sit, down, stand.