08/14/2025
Modern day dog work without acknowledging the land and the history of all it's people is shameless cultural appropriation. Prove me wrong.
1. The Hypothesis
"Clicker training," as it’s known today, may be an unintentional cultural echo of indigenous and traditional practices that used sharp, discrete sounds for communication with animals — both domestic and wild. While modern trainers attribute the click to behaviorist timing tools developed in labs and marine parks, its underlying auditory mechanism may draw on patterns humans have been using for millennia to shape, guide, or warn animals.
In other words: The “click” is not an invention — it’s a rediscovery of something ancient, re-wrapped in the language of psychology and sold as a novel method.
2. Pre-Pryor Clicker Training
Skinner Era: The earliest clicker-like conditioned reinforcers were mechanical sounds (e.g., metal cricket toys, ballpoint pen clicks) used by Keller & Marian Breland — both of whom studied under Skinner in the 1940s. They applied these sounds to train everything from chickens to porpoises long before Karen Pryor popularized them in the 1980s.
Marine Mammal Work: At Sea Life Park in Hawaii, Bob Bailey, Marian Breland Bailey, and others were already using whistles and click devices for dolphins and sea lions because the sound carried well in noisy environments and underwater.
Pryor’s Role: Karen Pryor didn’t invent the concept — she helped market and translate it for the pet-owning public in accessible books like Don’t Shoot the Dog!.
3. Indigenous Use of Clicks, Percussion, and Other Sharp Sounds
Human cultures have used concise, high-contrast sounds to signal across distances and across species for tens of thousands of years.
Clicks in Speech & Nonverbal Sound
Khoisan languages (Southern Africa) use click consonants (alveolar, lateral, dental) as part of everyday speech — producing high-pitched percussive bursts that carry far and cut through environmental noise.
Indigenous Australian hunters have documented use of tongue clicks to direct dogs and signal to each other without scaring prey.
San people of the Kalahari reportedly use non-linguistic clicks as hunting cues, not just as spoken consonants.
Percussive Signals for Animal Communication
Rock Clacking: Plains tribes in North America sometimes used stone clacks to signal horse herds or coordinate hunting drives.
Drum Beats: Drums in Amazonian and African contexts carried not just human messages but also acted as environmental cues animals could associate with food availability or human presence.
Antler Scraping: Among circumpolar peoples, scraping antlers or bones on certain surfaces was used to imitate animal sounds (e.g., moose, caribou) to attract them — but could also serve as a location cue to dogs or fellow hunters.
Whistled Languages: In places like the Canary Islands (Silbo Gomero) and Oaxaca, whistles mimic speech and direct both people and animals across long distances.
4. Primate and Cross-Species Relevance
Primate Studies: Wild chimpanzees produce mouth pops and wood-knocking sounds to signal others, especially in hunting contexts.
Domestication Contexts: Shepherds across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia have long used mouth clicks, tongue trills, and short whistles to direct livestock and herding dogs — effectively “clicker training” without the plastic box.
5. Why the Sound Works (Underwater & On Land)
Physics: A sharp, broadband sound (click, clap, clank) has a rapid onset and no drawn-out tail, which makes it easy for animal brains to pair with a preceding behavior in time.
Marine Application: Underwater, clicks travel farther and faster than low-pitched sounds, which is why dolphins use them for echolocation — and why early marine trainers favored metal clickers or whistles.
6. The Appropriation Angle
If we accept that:
Indigenous and traditional peoples used sharp, discrete sounds to cue animals for thousands of years,
These sounds served similar purposes — timing, location cues, attention-getting — as modern clicker training,
The lab-based “invention” of clicker training ignored or erased this lineage,
…then the “clicker” in modern force-free training could be viewed as a repackaging of an ancient interspecies communication tool — stripped of its cultural context and rebranded under Western behavioral science.
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