Clicker Training 101

One of my favorite things to do is to clicker train with my Mommy. Whenever I come downstairs to play each day the first thing I do is run into the kitchen and wait for my training. I get to learn fun things and get lots of treats for being such a talented bunny! So today I want to share a little bit about clicker training because it's easy and fun and something that any bunny mommy or daddy can do to play with their rabbit.

(Eagerly waiting for Mommy to start our training session.... sometimes I make it hard because I hop around her feet the entire time she's setting up!)

Why clicker training, you ask? 

We bunnies are actually super smart and we need a challenge! Because we're little, because tend to underestimate us, but we can learn tricks just like dogs or any other animal. Clicker training is a great way to give us exercise, stimulate our brains, and bond with us! It rewards us for good behavior, and once we learn some basics, it can be used to help us get over some of our naughty habits as well.

What you need to get started: 

Getting started it pretty simple. All you will need is a basic training clicker and a target stick. 

Why a clicker? The click gives us an auditory cue that we just did something good. It's better than just telling me "good boy" because the click sounds exactly the same every single time. I know when I hear the click that I did good and I'm going to get a treat as a reward. 

You can use just about any training clicker. My Mom likes these because they have a wrist band. When training she's holding the clicker, the target, and my treats, so the wrist band helps her not drop the clicker everywhere as we train.

The target stick helps me focus and gives me a visual clue as to what you want me to do. I'm smart, but I'm a bunny. I don't have a very long attention span. When I see the target, I know it's time to train. Also, sometimes I'll get over stimulated (you can tell, I'll bob my head around all excited), and the target helps me refocus. Some people make their own target sticks with a ping pong ball or tennis ball and a stick. My Mom didn't have anything to make one out of and figured by the time she bought the items to make the stick, she may as well just buy one. All you really want is something on the end that we can focus on. 

Mom likes this one because it expands to about two feet and then collapses to about 6 inches, which makes it easier to store.

Those are really the only two things you need. I like jumping, so my Mommy has made me an obstacle. While you can find doggie agility obstacles online, those are all way too big, so she made me one out of textbooks and a yard stick, but more on that when we talk about jumping.

Oh, and the treats. That's the best part! You can use any treat, but you'll want something you can give to me in tiny pieces so you don't give me too much and ruin my dinner (not that I care... I LOVE to eat, but Mommy wants me to eat healthy, silly human!). Mom likes to use fresh fruit like apple or strawberry cut into little pieces. For a full session I get either half a slice of apple during training cut into 15-20 pieces, or half a strawberry. You can also use pellets. Whatever works for you!

Getting Started:

Start simple. Hold the target out in front of me and when I touch it with my nose, click and reward, then repeat. It might be a good idea to rub a little fruit on the target ball so it smells nice. If your bunny isn't interested, then give up and try again later. Don't chase your bunny with the target stick, we don't like that. Once we get good at that, try holding up the target stick with the command "stand up". If we stand up and touch it, then click and reward. 

Repetition is important, but you don't want to overdo it. My Mommy started me out with about five or six clicks, and then increased the number of times I learned new tricks. I learned pretty fast, so now I typically do about 15 to 20 tricks per session (they're pretty simple, so it's not as much as you think). If it seems like your rabbit is losing interest, then don't force them to play. Clicker training can take some patience. Some days we are really on and doing good, and some days we might be a little off. One day we got ready to start and I decided I needed water, so I hopped off. Mommy set everything aside and waited until I was ready, rather than force me to play when I'm not into it. Of course, as soon as she sat down and started to do something else I hopped into the kitchen and was ready to start! I am the star of the show, you know, so things have to be on my terms!

Tricks I've Learned:

"Stand up": This is the first basic trick I learned. It's pretty simple and a good way to start.

"Come": I actually learned to do this without a clicker, but you can do this command with clicker training too. Just walk away from your bunny, hold the target out on the ground and say "come!". I learned with my name too. 

"Spin around": Put your target beside the bunny and guide your rabbit in a circle saying "spin around". Eventually you can just move the target in a circle with the verbal command, showing me what you want me to do. Warning: Some rabbits for some reason prefer one direction over the other. I like spinning towards my right side better than my left, for example. Though sometimes I'll go to the left. It's a good idea to try both sides and if they don't go in one direction, try the other.

"Jump over": My favorite trick. So my Mommy fell in love with rabbit show jumping about ten years ago when she saw it on the Amazing Race.

Now, I'll never be able to do that. I'm an English Lop and my breed isn't a show jumping breed. Our ears are too long and get in the way and we're bigger, so all those high jumps would be hard on our joints and spines. I could get seriously hurt, doing that type of agility jumping, but I can do small obstacles (and I can jump pretty high when I want to get out of m pen, but my Mommy doesn't like me doing that) and things like that. 

To start out, she set out a yard stick directed me over it with the target stick. Then she added one textbook on each side to give it some height and left it at that level for about a week. My Mom has a billion textbooks she has collected from different AP trainings over the years, and they're all old editions of books, so if I take a bite out of them she doesn't care, so she can make a pretty good obstacle out of them. Then when I mastered that, she kept adding books. She also noticed that my big floppy feet were sliding on the floor and I didn't like that, so now she moves the kitchen run so I can jump on that. When she got to four textbooks on each side I figured out I could go under the yard stick, so she added a piece of cardboard between the books so I couldn't do that anymore. I thought I was being clever, but apparently the point is to go over and not under.

 

(I am totally ready to go in this picture!)

"Weave around": This one she guides me around her legs, weaving between them. It's the hardest one to film so there's no footage of this. This is also a longer trick, so it's tricky.

"Stay": Right now, Mommy is working on the "stay" command with me. She's planning on using this one to keep me out of the refrigerator whenever she's cooking (because I like to try to pull out the bags of lettuce in there). I get it about 75% of the time. What she does is hides the target and treats behind her back and holds up her hand in the "stay" gesture. Then she tells me to "stay" and backs up repeating the command. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't. Once I get it, she clicks and gives me a treat. Then she tries again and once I get "stay", she calls me and tells me to come and clicks and I get my treat. 

Once I got individual commands, she's started combining them. "Jump over" has "come back" added, for example. And sometimes Mommy will add "spin around" after jumping. There are lots of different tricks we can learn, so the possibilities are endless!

Each session ends with the "Box" command, where Mommy indicates my litter box with the target stick and I jump into it and get my last treat there. This started because I used to get overly excited when I was a baby and would pee on the floor. Now it's just a good way to end each session (and a nice reminder of where I'm supposed to go to the bathroom). 

Mom is also using clicker training to help me do better with being picked up. I was developing a bad habit of kicking my feet too much each night when she put me to bed, and so now whenever she picks me up, if I'm a good bunny, she clicks and I get a few pellets as a treat. It's working pretty well, and I've been getting much better about being picked up than I was before. So there are a lot of different uses for clicker training. 

So there you have it! I started clicker training when I was about twelve weeks old, but you can really start at any age. You are never too old to learn new tricks! Mommy and I also saw on "It's Me or the Dog" that Victoria was using clicker training to train a baby pig, so it can apply to lots of different animals too! 

I hope you found this information helpful, and have a "hoppy" day!