What Treats Should You Use for Dog Training?

Real food, cut small, in three tiers. Boiled chicken, string cheese, and hot dogs will outwork every bag of training treats on the shelf, and they cost less. If you take nothing else from this, stop buying crunchy biscuit style treats for training. They take too long to eat, they crumble, and dogs do not rate them highly enough to work for.

The three tier system

Have three levels of pay available and use them deliberately. This is the part that separates dogs who work well in the kitchen from dogs who work well at the park.

• Tier one, everyday. The dog's own kibble. Use it for known behaviors in the house, for name response, for the hundred small repetitions you do while making coffee. Free, and it is food the dog was getting anyway.
• Tier two, working. Soft, smelly, chewable. Boiled chicken breast, low sodium hot dogs, string cheese, freeze dried liver, soft training treats from a bag. Use these outdoors, for new behaviors, and any time there is a distraction.
• Tier three, jackpot. The absurd stuff. Roast beef, canned tripe, squeeze cheese, a spoonful of peanut butter. Reserved for recalls, for the first rep in a hard environment, and for anything you want to be unforgettable. Used maybe five times a week.

The mistake most owners make is having only one tier, usually a bag of tier two, and then wondering why the dog will not recall away from a squirrel. You have nothing left to escalate to.

Size and quantity

Pea sized. For a dog over fifty pounds, dice sized. It should be swallowed, not chewed, and the dog should be ready for the next rep in under two seconds.

Owners give treats that are three to five times too large, which means fewer reps, a full dog, and a session that ends early. Twenty tiny pieces teach far more than five big ones.

Ten percent of daily calories is the usual rule for treats. In practice I do it the other way round: measure the dog's daily ration in the morning and take training food out of that total. On a heavy training day, dinner is smaller. This keeps the dog at a healthy weight and keeps food valuable, which is the real currency.

What to buy at the grocery store

• Boiled chicken breast. Cook a pound on Sunday, dice it, keep three days in the fridge and freeze the rest in portions. The best value tier two there is.
• String cheese. Pinch off small pieces. Convenient, holds up in a pocket, most dogs rate it highly.
• Low sodium hot dogs. Slice into coins, then quarter the coins. Microwave the slices on paper towel for sixty seconds to dry them out and they stop being greasy.
• Freeze dried single ingredient treats. Liver, minnows, lung. Expensive per bag but you use very little, they keep forever, and they are the strongest smell available.
• Squeeze cheese or a tube of pate. For a dog that will not take food outdoors, licking works when chewing does not.

What to skip

Skip anything that crunches into crumbs. Skip dental chews and biscuits for training use, since they are snacks. Skip anything with a first ingredient of corn or wheat flour, not for health reasons particularly, but because dogs do not work hard for them.

I would also skip most training treat marketing. The difference between a fifteen dollar bag and boiled chicken is in your favor for the chicken on price, palatability, and softness.

Two problems that look like treat problems

The dog will not take food outside. Nine times out of ten this is stress, not a treat quality issue. A dog that turns down chicken in a parking lot is over threshold and you need more distance, not better food. Move fifty feet further from whatever it is and try again.

The dog only works when it sees food. That is a training mechanics issue. Keep the food out of your hand, in a pouch or a pocket, and produce it after the behavior. If the food appears before the dog decides, you have taught the dog to check for payment first.

Fading them without losing the behavior

You do not need treats forever, and you do get there faster with a marker word. Once a behavior is reliable, move to paying about half the reps, chosen randomly. Random pay produces stronger behavior than every time pay, which is the same reason slot machines work.

Then start using life rewards. Sit before the door opens, and the door opening is the pay. Down before the food bowl goes down. Recall, then released back to sniff. For most of a dog's life these are what maintain the behavior, and food comes back out for anything new or anything hard.

If you want the daily structure that uses all of this in ten minutes a day, the free blueprint is here. Download the 10 Minute Foundation blueprint

Ready to train your dog?

Every drill in this article comes from the WorldWide K9 Academy course library. If you want the full step by step system, start with the $5 intro course.