Clicker Expo 2014

I was lucky enough to attend Clicker Expo and are you asking... what the heck is Clicker Expo?! That was a question I asked the first time I'd heard of it!  Well, it's a three day conference with lectures and hands on training from leading positive based trainers and behaviorist. 

Here's the link to the ClickerExpo Faculty & Speakers - I'm telling you this is an amazing group of people who have scientific data to back up why positive based training works and should be the training model for everyone.

Faculty answering questions - a great discussion!

One of the biggest issues for me was trying to decide which sessions to attend!  I wanted to go to all of them.  Here's the link of the Session details again all amazing. 

And the sessions I attend:

- Emotional Fluency: Capturing emotions in training
- You're in Great Shape: Understanding & applying shaping
- Power of Choice: Locus of control and dealing with problem behaviors
- Training the Easily Frustrated Dog
- Transformers: Training shelter dogs
- The Power of the Conditioned Emotional Response
- On Guard: modifications of food guarding
- Effectiveness is Not Enough: The ethical intervention
- Wallflowers: reaching the shy dog
- Parameters of Premack
- Criteria Raising Re-Examined

I was pleasantly surprised that all of these speakers held my attention and they went even further by getting me to do a lot of thinking about my own dogs and the fosters that come to me.  Keep in mind this is a huge amount of information to take in over very few days.  This speaks to their content, skills and the power of the information they were sharing.  I though I might be a bit bored on the lectures by the behaviorists but, they were amazing and in fact, one of my top favorites was the ethics lecture.  I could listen to Dr. Friedman talk all day, everyday.

While I left the conference energized and my brain was overflowing - the themes that resonated with me were around: emotions, giving control to the animal, flexibility of the human and building/strengthening relationships.  All of these have the science backing of why they are so important and help the human and animal.

 

So, stay tuned - I have no doubt that as my brain settles down, you will be reading how I'm incorporating this information with our dogs and the fosters that come to us!