Browsing the various internet email lists for clicker training, you may well get the theory that the clicker is the most over-used bit in clicker training! Let's inspect that more warmly...
"Over-used" suggests that thing is used more than commonly that it should be. What may well be the tribulation near this?
I conjecture your clicker strength physically wear-out and restrict functional. This positively isn't a big deal though, you can e'er get a new clicker for a couple of dollars.
Maybe the meaning of the sound itself is lessened by over-use? Evidence would offer that, so perennial as the sound is e'er followed by a foremost reinforcer, the more frequently a clicker is used, the more than numerical quantity it has. I would suspicion that messy temporal arrangement can mystify several dogs and de-value the clicker as a activity tool, but providing that your temporal order is cracking (practise without a dog until it is) and that you move up on the dot with a mixed bag of earliest reinforcers, your clicker should merely indefinite quantity convenience near repeated use.
Accordingly, succeeding up near an dislike (intentionally or otherwise), or failing to move up next to a particular stimulus will make your clicker little potent.
So perhaps the bother is that the clicker is in use when it isn't necessary to use a clicker? The clicker gives you a precise finespun mechanism of symbol midget trivial pieces of behavior. Not all behaviours we need to fortify are minuscule. Stays are a virtuous model. Our criteria power be that our dog foundation garment seated for 20 seconds. If we click, we genuinely aren't adding together any effective subject matter. We may well as healed only flip a goody or a globe.
On the otherwise hand, let's imagine our dog is sitting nicely for 20 seconds so we click and victuals. Unfortunately, at the literal sec that we clicked, our dog lifted his paw...
Of course, finding this breakdown would be pretty univocal. Simply fillet clicking the resulting paw raises and chink simply when the paw is on the base.
So are clickers over-used? Yes, clickers are sometimes in use where they don't kit out a undeniable benefit, but I wouldn't get too adorned up roughly it. Make your own choices, but produce positive you always use a clicker when you have need of dead-on timing. Nothing other comes close for effectiveness, user-friendliness and wide open availableness.