Will I always need to use food rewards with my 7 year old dog?

I think a lot of your success or failure using food is going to be determined by how you use food in your training. We have a system of delivering rewards in the foundation training that may be different than how you did it years ago. You can always modify or start from scratch and before you fade food you need to understand the different reward schedules. It may be more difficult to fade food but dogs are pretty resilient and can learn new things if we take the time to work on it.

I am often asked this question and I usually answer with "Why wouldn't you want to reward your dog forever?" I reward my dogs on some sort of variable or random schedule for their lifetime. It keeps their skills sharp and their attitude about interacting with me positive. My dogs are a big part of my daily life and I love interacting with them. I might not reward them every time we're out together or I might reward them a lot, it depends on the environment and what we are doing that day.