There have been five labs sharing parts of my seven decades on earth. Four were good bird dogs and retrievers. All were well behaved with people and great pets. My current lab has less hunting drive than any of the others but that's OK because I, too, have less drive than before. She's #2 on my favorite lab list and may hit #1 if she lives long enough. Recall and responding to voice commands reliably are absolutes with me. I was talking with a dog trainer who advocated clicker training. The idiot had no answer when I asked what she'd do if her dog was running toward traffic and she didn't have a clicker.
As I understand it “Clicker Training “ is just a variant of reward based training, which has been extraordinarily successful in training animals to do various tasks. The clicker itself is just a training tool to mark a desired behavior. Having one in hand is not needed to get a good response in a trained dog.
