Amazed

I shouldn't be amazed any more. I have been clicker training my animals for years. At some point I should just be able to say "Yep, that's normal." But I'm just not there yet. I was working with Vivre on standing on a paw target. This will transfer to several other behavior. We had a couple of training sessions with it earlier, but I hadn't revisited it until now. So we usually work in short 2-3 minute sessions and were on our third today. Two of the cats got in to fight, for those of you who have heard cat fights you know how awful this sounds. Normally Vivre rushes straight over there to get in to the middle of it, but today as she started to take off she hit the target. When I clicked she stopped dead. You could see her practically dancing from foot to foot trying to decided if she should stay and get her treat or head off for the cats. The treat one out and as she was headed back to the cats she hit it again. Click! She stayed. Part of her mind was still on the cats until after the second click, but I love the fact that a dog, especially a puppy will choose to stay and work rather than go check out the cats.
That is the reason I ended up crossing over to clicker training. My GSD mix, Yoda's, biggest distraction was the ferret. I didn't know enough about training when he was younger to understand raising the distraction level slowly. I had always been told to just correct them if they didn't listen. I hated doing that and finally just accepted that he would never work around the ferrets. Until I decided to train the cats and gave clicker training him a shot. The only time he looked away from the target stick was when the ferret was litterly walking on him and even then it was a quick glance and then he shot his back to me to make sure he didn't miss a chance to touch the target.
I know some people do, but I don't know how you can have that and still go back to traditional training. I couldn't.