When to Train With Kibble

Training Dogs with Food Rewards - Version 2024

It may seem counterintuitive to say that we don't want to use our dog's highest-value food reward all the time. With some dogs, there may be times in teaching a behavior where that's exactly what we need to do.

The same thing may happen with dogs that are transitioned to toy rewards. Let's say we have an extremely high food drive dog that gets so amped up when it knows you have steak that it's brain stops working and the steak becomes more of a distraction. So much so that we need to add pressure to calm the dog down so we can help it learn. If that ever becomes the case with your dog, then change your food rewards to a lesser value food reward, maybe kibble.

Once the dog knows the behavior and once it has gone through impulse control training, you will be able to go back and use high-value rewards like steak again. At that point, the dog understands that the road to steak is to stay focused and offer the behavior we ask for.

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When people have specific training questions we recommend that they go to our website and post those questions in the ASK CINDY on the front page of leerburg.com. Cindy has been training dogs since she was a teenager and has competed in several dog sports at a regional and national level. She was also a vet tech and owned a boarding/training and grooming business for many years as well as breeding working Dobermans and Belgian Malinois under the kennel name Kaiserhaus.

Questions posted to ASK CINDY are answered almost every day. They are also recorded in our systems if a dog owner has additional questions Cindy will review the previous Q&As and this helps her give better feedback and assistance.