My wife Heather and I first met Donna and her husband Robert when they came to look at our first litter of puppies. Donna has the unique ability to brighten the dullest of days. I've known her for over five years and I've never experienced anything but elation from her. Her eyes dance. Her step is jaunty. Her every word bounces from her lips in joyous anticipation of some wonderful fun.

"Are you clicker training?" she asked me the day after my wife and I had been captivated by this lovely woman.

"Clicker training? I replied. "No. What is it?" Secretly I was feeling the real wacko beneath the facade was about to emerge.

Donna gushed about it. She talked on and on about this little plastic box and food rewards. Politely I informed her in my most unpretentious way that I already knew all there was to know about training dogs. Amazingly, she let the pompous ass in front of her wallow in his pomposity, and merely suggested that she might perhaps send me some information.

A couple of weeks went by and Donna and Robert came to pick up their new puppy 'Rupert.' Donna left me with Karen Pryor's book, Don't shoot the Dog. I thanked her profusely, put the book away, and immediately forgot all about it.

A normal person would have let me flounder in my self-induced haze of ignorance Not Donna. Donna's not particularly normal.

Soon after finding out that I hadn't read the book, Donna forwarded a video to me. Never actually saying it, but intimating pretty strongly that if I wasn't going to put in the effort of actually reading, perhaps I could take the time to watch something.

It was Karen Pryor's Clicker Magic. To say I was intrigued would be an understatement. Somewhere in the dim, dusty recesses of my memory this twigged something. Further, it induced me to actually break down and read the book.

Was Donna finished? Not a chance. Reluctantly, I was dragged to a two day seminar taught by a woman named Sue Ailsby.

Sue did some pretty amazing training and teaching over those two days. At one point she trained one of her dogs to put up its hackles on command. But the epiphany came at the tail end of the two days' training.

It came even after an older gentleman thanked her profusely and in a choked voice, with tears flowing down his face, admitted he had been doing things so wrong and cruelly to too many good dogs.

But the moment for me was when Sue asked if there were any other questions or comments. I, like and ass, told her I liked what I saw, but there was one training technique I was never going to relinquish.

When a dog jumped up, I would merely grab the paws and squeeze until the dog felt discomfort and then I'd release them. The behavior quickly stopped.

Sue smiled that smile that really says, "Boy, are you missing the boat or what?" What she said, however, was, "If I can show you a better, quicker, gentler way, will you switch to clicker training?" "Sure," I agreed readily. This was a cute method of training, but surely it couldn't compete with the speed of my training method.

Sue called up the orangutan (no offense intended to orangutans) dog of the class. The jumpy, itchy, barky, clawing-at-the-linoleum dog, with owner in tow, scratched her way to Sue and immediately jumped up on her. Sue crossed her arms, swung her body away from the dog and just as the dog's paws hit the ground, she clicked and treated.

"So?" I thought. "Big deal."

She repeated the procedure. The same thing happened.

On the third try, the dog jumped halfway up, stopped, and without touching Sue returned to the ground, got her click and remained in a sitting position. Jackpot! Big rewards. End of training session.

I have been clicker training ever since.

I have continued to read clicker books, watch clicker videos, go to seminars, and now teach clicker training myself.

There's no other training method that can train an aquarium fish to swim through a hoop on cue. Induce a self mutilating drill baboon to willingly stick out his arm to get his insulin shot every day. Get a cat to run through a miniature agility course, at the end, sit on a chair, on cue.

But even more amazing than all these things combined is the fact that clicker training could take a hardheaded jackass (no offense intended to jackasses) like myself and convince me that nothing else - including my own odd and ultimately cruel methodology - comes close to the power of clicker training.

Thanks, Donna.

This article was written by Greg Pendragon and was printed in the December 2002 issue of Dogs in Canada.