Spoiler: You Don’t Need to Be Afraid of Using Food to Train
JJ convinced me that training with food isn’t as bad as I once suspected.
A friend asked me a really great question about my training approach last weekend. A trainer she had worked with didn’t use food, because he wanted to foster calm behaviors in his dogs, and felt that food was too exciting and arousing.
It got me thinking about why I use treats and kibble during training. Before even we adopted JJ, I read a training book that instructed on how to teach your puppy obedience without using food. I don’t remember what the writer’s justification for not using food was, but I do remember that after reading it, I felt like using food in training was the training equivalent of selling out. I was one of those “I want my dog to listen because she’s my dog, not because I have food” folks. Hey, we all start somewhere.
Now, I use food to train JJ every day. Why?
The short answer is that I use food because it works, but there’s more to it than that.
Dogs (and all animals, including humans) learn via both operant and classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is what we mean when we say dogs learn by association. If you follow something neutral with something good, the neutral stimulus will begin to elicit a reaction in the dog that matches that of the pleasant stimulus. Think of Pavlov’s Dogs drooling when they heard a noise that consistently preceded food. Neutral stimuli can also be paired with aversive stimuli, creating a negative emotional response to the neutral stimuli. Classical conditioning doesn’t need to be done with food, but it does make it a little easier to change our dog’s feelings about scary things. If food produces tail wags, and food comes after the scary thing, the scary thing will eventually produce tail wags as well.
Since JJ is reactive and fairly noise-sensitive, I use classical conditioning to my advantage every day. When leaf blowers are running outside, she gets a stuffed Kong or food puzzle toy. When we see dogs on our walk, she gets extra tasty food, since dogs are a big trigger for her. When she hears barking, I follow that with bits of kibble. This has helped JJ’s confidence increase and helped her begin to learn to accept spooky things.
Operant conditioning is what we think about when we talk about learning specific behaviors. Behaviors can be increased in frequency via reinforcement or decreased in frequency via punishment. There are four quadrants, but today we’ll just talk about the one where our discussion of food is most important: positive reinforcement.
Positive reinforcement works to increase behaviors by providing the dog with something favorable. Ultimately, the value of a reinforcer (aka what actually produces a change in behavior) is specific to each individual dog, but generally speaking, food, play, petting, and praise can all work.
But here’s where food really shines. Research has indicated that food maintains behaviors with higher rates of responding than does petting/human-dog social interaction. Dogs reinforced using food have also been shown to respond quicker to cues (aka commands) than those reinforced using petting. And praise seems to perform even lower than petting as a reinforcer.
I do use petting and praise with JJ, but usually when I don’t have treats on hand, or I use them in conjunction with food. The conclusion here is that food is typically queen when it comes to reinforcing behaviors that you’d like to see more frequently from your dog.
Am I bribing my dog? Will I have to use food forever?
The order of events in training is important. If I throw food onto the back seat of the car to get JJ to hop up, that’s a lure, and might be considered a bribe. It’s possible that with this order of events, your dog will only get into the car if you have a lure in your hand. On the other hand, if JJ hops up onto the backseat, and then I give her a treat, that’s her reinforcement. After lots of practice with this, JJ will hop up regardless of whether or not I have food in my pocket, since she will have a strong history of reinforcement with the “jumping into the car” behavior. Positive reinforcement training is all about what you’ve paid your dog in the past, not what you’re going to pay him in a minute.
The hardest thing about training with food is changing our own behavior. We have to remember to put our treat bag on when we grab the leash, or take a baggy of kibble with us when we head out to the brewery with our pups (if you’re one of the lucky ones who can do this.) But ultimately, these are small changes that are easy to turn into part of our daily routine over time. I almost never leave the house with JJ unless I have some kibble with me. I never know when she might do something really great that I want to reinforce, like laying calmly while our neighbor saws down some branches outside.
Training with food has enriched my relationship with JJ.
We play fun training games that build her confidence, and I’ve been trained to look out for when she’s being good, not just when she’s being bad. It helps me stay optimistic on rough days with her. And honestly, few things make me happier than the big, thumping tail wags she gives me when we train.