A puppy is always learning whether you are actively training or not. Using your puppy’s normal dry kibble as their main training treat, you can maximize the training opportunities throughout the day, while maintaining health and weight goals.
Healthy Treats = Unlimited Treats
Puppies have specific nutritional needs that your normal kibble should be providing. Often, special treats are used for training. But there is a potential issue. Those special treats are not nutritionally balanced and they can also cause an upset stomach or overfeeding. And if you read the label of many treats, it will list an uncomfortably low number of treats you are recommended to give throughout the day (for example, 2-4 per day). Especially during the first several months, you want to be a treat machine that continuously rewards your puppy.
That leads to an uncomfortable situation, do you give more special treats to support training at the expense of weight and health issues? Or do you train without special treats but do so ineffectively?
The solution is to turn your puppy’s normal kibble into their treats — supplemented with a small number of special, high-value treats. Doing so helps keep your dog at a healthy weight (see A Healthy Dog is a Happy Dog: Effective Weight Management Strategies) while also allowing unlimited treats during the day. This completely removes the conflict and opens the floodgate for rewards.
Reward Shaping
What is considered a reward, and how your puppy trains you to up the value of rewards over time, is a back-and-forth that will develop through months. I still remember the first time our puppy Tuna refused a command until seeing what treat I was offering to comply.
With reward shaping, we may start with a high-level treat to get a moment of focus or to get over periods of frustration but then reduce and replace the high-value treat with normal kibble. Eventually, you want your puppy to react as positively to a marker of success and a verbal reward (“Good boy”) than to a treat, and a way to get there is to give kibble as treats frequently and then slightly less frequently, to hold the training.
Even in elevators today, Tuna will sit and make full eye contact. Sometimes he’ll get a piece of kibble as a treat, some times he’ll get a “good boy.” But we’ve successfully trained him that elevators are for sitting, and performing the expected behavior puts him into a reward zone.
Beyond tricks, training is for life
Treats are underused by most dog owners. Beyond motivation to learn a new trick, treats can be used to support a number of daily behaviors. For all of these, the pattern is actually simple.
- Set an expected behavior
- Train the expected behavior
- Once learned, support the expected behavior with verbal and normal kibble treats
We always leave the apartment with Tuna’s treat bag (and sometimes out of habit leave with the treat bag without him). This makes it easy and convenient to support any number of expected behaviors such as:
- Sitting for crosswalks
- Appropriate pace on walks
- Redirection from squirrels
- Laying down at a cafe
- Resting on a bench
- Sitting in elevators
- Overcoming fear of a new situation
- Impromptu training session while waiting
For many of the above, without treats, we would have to resort to physical control (leash pulling) but having an endless supply of healthy treats makes it easier to support good behaviors.
Remember, every mealtime is training time
The first two areas to learn for a new puppy are potty training and legal chew toys. But even after making progress on chew toys, mealtime is an amazing opportunity for training. Our Feeding Routine for Behavior and Health covers how we prepare food and how it supports good dog behavior throughout the dog’s life.
