it's becoming a well-known fact in much of the dog training community that clicker training is unprecedented as a method of teaching a dog new behaviors if you've been watching my videos or others on YouTube then you already know that just about any dog Drake obedience Q can very effectively be taught and addressed with clicker training but the question today is can we use it to modify existing behaviors the quick answer is yes we can we can change the way a dog perceives or emotionally experiences a situation this is something that I have had the opportunity to do with a number of different dogs and in the next couple of months I'm going to show you how I approach a range of issues but today let's take something really simple getting their nails clipped is something that in my experience a lot of dogs don't enjoy you can see here that cilia does not enjoy getting her nails clipped she pulls her paw back and it's quite obvious that she wants no part in this she even offers a calming signal by licking her lips and turning her head the first thing I want to do is build her tolerance to getting her paws handled I'm going to gently squeeze and separate the toes and then click making a positive and familiar Association with this kind of touch I'm going to repeat this process until she becomes very comfortable with it here you can see she even offers me her paw voluntarily which tells me that she is ready for the next step I'm now going to present the trimmer but click before she has an avoidance response this will help teach her that trimmers aren't so bad after all eventually we can click for touching the nail trimmer to her paw after just a few minutes she's a lot less bothered by the trimmers lightly tapping against her nails and with just a little encouragement she's willing to continue playing this game and now I'm going to apply a little bit of pressure with the trimmer and click simultaneously without actually clipping the nail and after just a few minutes I was able to safely clip her nails good girl another trick if the dog knows leave it is to divert their attention with the tree and release them to get it only after you are able to clip allow the dog to sniff and explore the nail file but click for looking away a session like this would average probably around 10 minutes and she was comfortable here letting me clip her nails and this was just the very beginning after a few days you're no longer going to need to have a clicker or treats whenever you want to cut their nails the emotional perception of the experience will change and my point is that with a systematic and intuitive approach you can use clicker training to modify any behavior in any dog