What are you using for food reinforcement this week?

A big, creative part of dog training is understanding controlling all the many types of reinforcement that your dog will work hard to earn! Because food is a primary reinforcer, you need to start your mastery of dog training by understanding and mastering the ability to create and use food reinforcement.

Food is the EASIEST reinforcement to create and control for your dog. If you are not an expert at using food reinforcement, you will not be likely to recognize, deliver or control other forms of reinforcement.

Yes, sometimes it “seems” like a dog is not interested in food, but that doesn’t mean you just toss up your hands and give up. He DOES want to eat SOMETHING at SOME times and your goal will be to help him get used to eating more things in more situations. It’s kind of similar to teaching children to eat more variety of foods. The more variety of foods you have introduced, the easier it will be to food reinforce your dog. Think outside the bowl. What foods have you tried? Purchased dog treats, in spite of their cost, are generally not terribly interesting to dogs.

Your goal is to have your dog feel pleasantly surprised by how well an activity with you is paying off. The food reinforcement needs to “match” the behavioral effort. Training “sit” in the house, maybe all you need there is a piece of kibble. Training come away from big distraction when called likely requires something much much better than kibble. Maybe pieces of a cheese and steak sandwich.

But if you’ve been serving cheese steak sandwiches every day for a week, the cheese steak might not seem so special anymore. We need to be constantly cooking up new reinforcers to show our dogs the incredible value of working with us, and to meet the needs of the particular behavior challenges we present.

Sometimes, we might want something that slides right down, like a piece of cheese. a bite of pupperoni, hotdog, liver or chicken. Othertimes, we might want our dog to stay and chill and chewing a raw beef bone makes a better reinforcement for a prolonged down stay.

What are you using for food reinforcement this week? What things does your dog love to get as a food prize?