Beginning trainers always wonder about the question — what treats to use for reinforcement. This is a crucial question when you start training with a dog.
The success of the training process depends on how much the dog desires the food used for reinforcement.
So, the requirements for treats:
✔️ It should be tasty for the dog.
✔️ It should be easy for the dog to eat quickly, not to chew for a long time, forgetting why they were given and why they came to the training ground.
✔️ It should be cut into pieces of a convenient size to fit in the hand, but at the same time, the dog cannot quickly get full and refuse to work (for me, a good size is cubes of 1 cm each side).
✔️ It should not stain the pocket or bag, and no liquid, fat, or crumbs should come off it.
✔️ It should not break into small pieces in the hand, showering the entire training ground.
✔️ It should lie in the pocket or bag for training without a noisy wrapper.
✔️ Ideally, on the first training sessions, it should not be dry food (later, with well-developed food motivation, dry food is possible).
✔️ The ideal treat is boiled or dried meat. Cheese can also be used. In extreme cases, sausages (but very extreme, as they are not recommended even for humans, let alone dogs).
We recommend to all handlers to feed the dog only during training sessions to develop food motivation in the dog. If the dog receives food as a salary and has no other opportunity to eat, it will have a different attitude towards food.
We never advocate leaving dogs hungry, let alone starving them for several days!!!
It is essential to distinguish between a hungry dog and a dog that always wants to eat.
Our task is to turn any dog into one that is always ready to work to earn food.