Dog Training Treats

Using treats is a very effective way of rewarding your dog.

Treats are extremely simple to use and they are extremely useful to make sure that you can easily work through many repetitions of a task in a short space of time. This can be extremely important in the early stages of training your dog.

Here are some things to think about when deciding on what you will use a “treat”.

• When training your dog, you should always use a treat which is better than your dog’s normal dinner.

• The treat should be small enough that your dog does not start to feel full immediately, but it has to be sufficient to be worth the effort.

• Treats should be soft and juicy so that they can be swallowed easily and quickly – you don’t want to wasting valuable training time by having your dog standing around chewing something.

• It is a very good idea to alter between 4-5 different types of treat. This way you will stop your dog getting bored with something and they always have something to look forward to for getting it right.

• When training a lot with treats, you really need to reduce the amount of food your dog gets ”for free” at dinnertime (this is especially important if you have a dog who gains weight easily)

You can even consider letting your dog work for its ENTIRE dinner now and again (after all, in the wild they’d be working for all their meals)

Think about different ways to give the treats, this will vary the activity for your dog and make it more interesting and stimulating. You can give them from your hand of course, but you might want to play a game like “choose the hand”, with one empty hand. You can put a treat in his or her bowl, and make them sit before getting an OK to eat it.

Try and think of ways to relate the delivery to the activity you are training for.