Myths About Training dogs with food rewards
If someone were to ask you about the best way to train your dog, what answer would come to your mind? If you ask a group of people this question, it’s likely that you will get several different kinds of answers with several different perspectives. This is because dog training as an industry is widely unregulated, and leaves room for lots of different viewpoints about the best way to change canine behavior. However, some methods and perspectives are based in myths, while others can be backed with current scientific findings. When it comes to training with positive reinforcement and rewards, you may have heard conflicting information about how it works.
Positive reinforcement is one quadrant of operant conditioning, which means something is added to increase the likelihood of a behavior occurring again.
For example, if you give your dog a piece of chicken for sitting, they will be more likely to sit the next time you ask. We can additionally use food and other reinforcers a dog enjoys to classically condition a positive emotional response in a dog, which especially comes in handy with modifying behaviors that are rooted in negative emotions. When you pair a stimulus that elicits a negative response in your dog with a positive consequence (for example, pairing looking at strangers/other dogs with high value food for a reactive dog), you will eventually start to shift that dog’s emotional response to triggers from negative to positive (“Ooh, a dog! That means treats!”).
Training with positive reinforcement and food rewards is effective and humane when done correctly under the guidance of a well educated professional. However, unfortunately there are many common myths that are pushed by “old school” trainers that still linger around today and may be confusing to the average pet owner to determine what is fact vs. fiction. Today, we’re going to bust a few of those common myths!
Myth 1: Am I Just Bribing My Dog to Listen to Me?
Dogs (and humans, and all animals) only behave in certain ways because they have a motivation driving them to do so. You get up to go pour yourself a glass of water because your thirst motivates you to do it. You hold the door open for a stranger because in the past, you’ve been thanked for doing so and it made you feel good. You go into work every day because you desire to receive a paycheck. Similarly, our dogs also perform behaviors to acquire something that motivates them! Training with rewards is simply using enjoyable things that motivate your dog to change their behavior.
Because behavior is driven by an underlying motivator, if we are not using motivators the dog desires to get behavior from our dogs, that means we are likely using motivators our dog wants to avoid. This means that we are training our dogs with discomfort, intimidation, and sometimes even pain to get behavior from them which can be very damaging to their confidence, your relationship with them, and can often create unintended negative side effects. You may get rid of one behavior you don’t want from your dog through this style of training, but another problem behavior may pop up to replace it.
So, in summary: no matter what methods we choose to train with, our dogs are often either working to acquire or avoid something. Using rewards to train is the better alternative over using coercion or discomfort as it has a smaller potential for negative fallout, and encourages our dogs to work because they want to, not because they are trying to avoid what will happen if they don’t. All of us deserve fair payment for our efforts, and dogs are included in that!
Myth 2: Won’t My Dog Become Overweight?
They could, but only if you aren’t being smart about it! Training with food while also maintaining your dog’s healthy weight is actually very easy to do so long as you take a few considerations into account. The main factors we look out for are:
Keeping track of portion sizes at meal time:
If you are training with significant portions of food throughout the day, you will need to take this into account when portioning out your dog’s breakfast and dinner. People commonly overlook this when starting to train with food. They will feed enough food throughout the day through training to account for a full meal for their dog, but won’t cut back on the amounts of food given at mealtimes so the dog ends up eating more calories than usual. When you’ve used a lot of food through training in a day or used treats higher in calories like hot dog, cheese, etc, make sure to adjust the following meals given accordingly. Typically after a long training session with a lot of high value food, we will recommend the dog only gets a half or less portion of their dinner that evening.
Does your dog work for their regular diet? Use this to your advantage:
Some dogs have a higher drive for food than others. This means, a lot of dogs out there will work for their regular pieces of kibble! If this sounds like your dog, you may not need to use food outside of meals very often to train (except for training in high distraction or for “special” behaviors like recalls). If your dog is easily motivated to work for their regular everyday food they get at mealtimes, just portion out parts of their daily meals and set them aside to use in training throughout the day. If your dog is not motivated by their regular food or you are doing work that requires higher value foods, try looking for meal toppers or higher value foods that are still nutritionally complete that could be fed as part of a balanced meal. We often recommend Fresh Pet Selects (insert link) as this is a complete dog food, but is highly palatable and many dogs will consider it to be a high value reward. Many dogs will also happily work for freeze dried meal toppers, or other mix-ins from the pet store designed to make your dog’s regular food more appealing.
Food used in training should be fed in small amounts per repetition:
Dogs do not need large pieces of food when training. Typically, food cut into pea or dime sized pieces is all it takes to effectively train behaviors with your dog. If you’re attentive about making sure to give your dog just a small amount of a treat per repetition in your training sessions, you will end up only using a fairly small amount of food overall!
Myth 3: Does Training With Positive Reinforcement Mean I Let My Dog Do Anything He Wants?
There’s a common misconception out there that to train with positive reinforcement, you’re going to have to just “ignore” all of your dog’s undesirable behaviors and wait until they do something you like to reward it. This is not the case, or reasonable to ask of dog owners dealing with more severe behavior issues. We train with positive reinforcement because it is effective and keeps your dog’s confidence/relationship with you intact, but this does not mean that we will ask you to let your dog do just anything he wants, especially if the behavior is unsafe. We will help you keep control of your dog through showing you different management techniques and also how to stop undesirable behavior, redirect your dog, and reward an incompatible alternative behavior that is more appropriate. Positive does not mean permissive, it just means that we are being fair to our dogs by showing them what we want instead of waiting for them to fail and correcting/punishing them for it.
Myth 4: Will I Have To Feed All These Treats Forever?!
When people ask us if they have to feed treats forever, our answer is usually: yes and no!
As a dog fully learns and understands a behavior (typically we look for a 90% success rate), we can actually start tapering off some of our food rewards and start rewarding the dog intermittently. The rewards should not typically stop entirely (we don’t go to work expecting one day to stop receiving paychecks!), but come in random intervals instead of after every single repetition like they were in the “learning” stage of a new behavior.
For example, when teaching loose leash walking, we start out by keeping a really high rate of reinforcement with the dog, and reward them for every couple of steps of walking on a loose leash. As time goes on and the behavior is really consistent in different environments and contexts, we will start rewarding just occasionally throughout the walk for good leash behavior. Sometimes we reward after 5 steps, sometimes after 30 steps. This also takes some pressure off of you and allows you to be able to be a little more relaxed with your rewards and enjoy your dog’s new behavior!
Food is also not the only tool in our toolbox that we can use to reinforce behavior we like from our dogs! With certain impulse control exercises, like waiting to be released through the door, the actual release from the behavior itself to move forward through the door can become the reward once the behavior is learned. Out on walks, we can train our dogs to sniff on cue, and use this as a reward as dogs find sniffing very reinforcing. Some dogs are very motivated by toys or praise, depending on your dog’s personality and what you’re asking them to do, these can also be great replacements for food rewards! It’s all a matter of getting creative- if it is something your dog desires, you can likely find a way to use it as reinforcement for behavior you want.
Myth 5: My Dog Won’t See Me as Alpha If I Use Treats.
There is a pretty persistent myth out there in the training world that you need to be the “alpha” or “pack leader” over your dog to get desirable behavior from them. Thankfully, this is not the case and this theory is based in outdated thinking from the 1930’s and 1940’s. The idea of an “alpha” wolf came from a study of unrelated captive wolves that were placed together in an artificial setting. This study was quickly debunked, as the captive setting was completely unlike any structure you would see naturally, and therefore any findings could not be proved since the wolves were displaying highly unnatural behavior you wouldn’t find in a family unit in the wild. Additionally, dogs are capable of recognizing that humans are a separate species and do not treat us the same way as they do other dogs. We are simply two species co-existing with each other for our own benefit. Dog hierarchies are often very fluid, meaning there is not a fixed “alpha” dog in any given social structure, and social circumstances between dogs change depending on the context they’re in. Using food will not cause your dog to think less of you- in fact you will likely see your bond and their desire to work with you only improve! The “alpha” theory doesn’t exist, and you don’t need to worry about a nonexistent social hierarchy in your household being damaged by training with food and rewards.
Using food to train our dogs can be a really powerful means to get desirable behavior. It gives them something they enjoy as payment for participating, and it gives us an easily accessible means to turn something we don’t want into long-lasting behavior change. Dogs need our help to learn how to navigate our human world and learn what is appropriate. The best way to do this is to guide them to the correct answers with rewards as opposed to setting them up to learn through failure. Using food rewards can be a really effective means of doing so! Don’t be afraid of the myths, reward your dog!
