Building Motivation

Here’s my best advice for getting the most out of using food in training:

To get started, make sure your dog’s regular food is of high quality! We get ours from The Wandering Dog and Eden. Then, measure up all of your dog’s meals at the start of the day. Use the food during walks and training sessions. If there is anything left at the end of the day, feed it in a dog puzzle!

And to the point that is so often overlooked: don’t increase value by feeding a different type of food - instead increase value by varying how you deliver the rewards! The focus should be on the social interaction around the food, not the food itself. Let’s go into this one in a bit more depth.

To develop good play, take inspiration from the predatory sequence: orient, eye, stalk, chase, grab-bite, kill-bite, dissect, consume. To simplify and make it easier to remember, I usually just refer to it as searching, stalking, chasing, and fighting (consumption is obviously an inherent part of using food as well). All dog breeds have been selectively bred for a short part of this sequence.

Your breed of dog might therefore give you some clues as to how your dog prefers to have their rewards delivered (eg Spaniel - searching, Sighthound - chasing, Staffie - fighting). However, depending on how intentionally your dog was bred, there may be big individual differences - so do play around with it to see what your specific dog likes best!

Additionally, having a large tool box where your dog is able to take rewards in a variety of ways makes for much more effective training! It makes it easier to chain reward deliveries into a longer reward events, and makes it easier to transfer the right “mood” for the behaviour. For example, use a chase reward for faster recalls, or a search reward to help a dog settle.

If you want to learn more on the topic, have a look at our videos on food play here and here, and on fading food here. Under Training Tips on our homepage, see the series on Rewards, as well as the post The Hunt as a Model for Stimulation. 

Have fun training!