So we’ve talked about giving treats to help train your dog, now we need to talk about giving a treat fast enough but not so fast that you’re handing them the treat before they’ve even done the behaviour you want.
Rewards based training for all our dogs
As you know, our training is all reward-based. And that means we use treats a lot. I talked a lot about treats last week, how to use them to help train your dog and what treats to use.
Today I want to talk about a very common training mistake – not giving a treat fast enough.
When training your dog, you should aim to give your dog their treat as soon as they do the things you want.
Bad habits
But that can also lead to bad habits. One of these is that you might start reaching for the treat BEFORE your dog does the behaviour you want.
Perhaps you ask your dog to walk nicely on lead by your side.
You call your dog in to your side and they zoom in to where you want them to be.
You give the treat.
But you struggle to move on.
Your dog might only walk nicely when you are constantly feeding treats.
Or you find walks are a yo-yo, where your dog comes in as you ask, gets the treat then pulls back to the end of the lead again.
A big clue that things aren’t quite right is that you realise they are looking at your hand, not up at your face. You realise that as call your dog in to your side, at the same time you are reaching your hand into your pocket or treat bag… Your dog is responding to the movement of your hand rather than the cue you’ve just given.
This is common dog training mistake number 1
So today I want you to check your training habits. Make sure you are giving your cue, praising your dog for any response and only then reaching for your treat to reward your dog.
We watch each other and review ourselves regularly, because it’s so easy to fall into this type of bad habit. And just because we are trainers doesn’t mean we are immune from such things – in fact because we do so much training, there is more likelihood of us developing bad habits if we don’t watch out for them.
Video yourself doing some training then review it – you’ll be amazed at things you never realised you are doing.
And if you find you are doing everything perfectly then go and reward yourself with some tasty treat or other!
Keep training and stay safe,
Carol
