“I don’t want to bribe my dog with food” or “When can I stop using food?” are two common things I hear from clients.
For some reason, a lot of people see using food in training as some form of corruption, like if they use food the dog will like them less. Let me tell you this secret – it’s not true. In fact, the opposite is true. I know, I know. You want your dog to work because they love you or because you’re in charge. Nope. You don’t work for free and neither do dogs. No matter how much you love your job, you go to work to get a paycheck. Are you being bribed to go to work? No, you earned that paycheck with the work you’re doing and that paycheck keeps you coming back week to week.
Positive reinforcement training is not about bribing your dog! It’s about giving your dog a paycheck for a job well done.
Motivation takes many forms and drives everything that you, me and your dog does. So what’s the difference between a bribe and motivation?
Let’s look at definitions:
Bribe – “persuade (someone) to act in one’s favor, typically illegally or dishonestly, by a gift of money or other inducement.”
Motivation – “the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.”
Reward: “a thing given in recognition of one’s service, effort, or achievement.”
Skilled trainers use food as payment, not bribes.
How to tell the difference:
If every time you want your dog to sit, you first go to the treat jar, get a treat, show it to him and then say, “Look what I have…now sit.” If you do things this way, your dog will become reliant on seeing the food before doing what you’re asking and you will get frustrated over time that your dog “only sits if I have a treat.” This is bribery. Competent trainers don’t train like this. This is a common mistake with people who do DIY training and don’t use a professional, even for basic skills.
If you ask for a behavior with no visible (or smelled) food and then reward the dog after doing what you’ve asked, this is good training. The dog is responding to what you’re asking for without seeing or smelling the food. This is using food as motivation, not bribery.
In cases where we are helping a fearful, anxious or aggressive dog, and need to change how the dog feels about a situation (like helping him not be afraid of strangers or have his high value chew taken away), we use food to build a strong positive association between the scary thing predicting really yummy food is coming. Eventually, if done right, the dog goes from “I’m afraid of that” to “Yippee, I love that because it predicts steak!”
If you do training correctly (and that’s a big IF), then the dog will respond to the cue/ask without needing to see the food.
Where do people go wrong? When training basic skills like sit, not fading the visible food out soon enough when training. When beginning to train behaviors, we often start with food to lure a dog into the position we’re teaching. The dog follows the smell of the food into position and then we pay (reward) the dog in that position. But then over time we fade out the food lure, move to a hand signal and eventually verbal cue, and the dog only gets the food if they do the right thing. They did the job and they get the paycheck. If the dog does the wrong thing, like goes into the wrong position, then we cancel the food reward and the dog doesn’t earn it.
So how do we train what we want? We teach the dog what we’re asking them to do in order to get the paycheck. We break it down into manageable parts so the dog wins often and stays in the game. Then we make it gradually harder. And after the dog is reliably trained, we move intermittently rewarding them with food to help keep the behavior strong. This is the same idea behind slot machines. They don’t pay out every single time, but the chance that they will next time keeps you playing. But we can’t do it too soon, or the dog will quit playing our game.
So yes, use food in training. Lots of it. And good stuff. I promise you it’s not nefarious and it’s not going to damage your relationship. In fact, your dog will love you more if you’re the cheese lady.
One other comment: be sure you’re scaling the value of the food to the difficulty of the task you’re asking the dog to do. Recalls, leave it or other really important skills need high value food than easier skills like touch or sit. Don’t squander super high value stuff for really easy skills, or you those higher value foods will lose their potency for when you really need them.
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