When to stop training with treats?
Hortense Konopelski
2025-06-23 05:10:29
Count answers: 11
In reality, you don’t need to ever completely phase out treats and rewards. However, rewards should always be a part of training. As your dog becomes more experienced, you can begin to shift how frequently you treat or reward them. Ultimately, the frequency of treating dogs is a personal decision. But as your dog becomes more experienced with a specific skill or activity, you can start to randomize and vary the rate of reinforcement. When phasing out treats, you’ll want to work at your dog’s pace. Remember that needing or wanting to use more treats than someone else doesn’t mean your dog is less well-trained. When you first start taking your dog on walks, you’ll be consistently treating a lot for skills like loose-leash walking, ignoring things on the sidewalk, passing dogs and people, etc. If you’re walking your dog, eventually you might choose to give them a lot of verbal praise but only pull out treats to mark and reward their good behavior in more challenging moments, such as if you’re walking past a barking dog.
Delaney Kautzer
2025-06-23 03:53:25
Count answers: 7
Bad news is: unless you have a unicorn dog that will work for strictly praise and pets, you should really never stop using food or toy reinforcers in your training. Behavior is LAWFUL, and while it is rare to be able to make any guarantees when it comes to behavior, there is one guarantee in the world of behavior: if you stop reinforcing a behavior with something the dog is actually WILLING TO WORK FOR, something that motivates the dog, that behavior will extinguish. If you stop reinforcing and let the environment become a better deal for your dog, you are actively working against yourself. Now of course you could say "well, just put the behavior on an intermittent schedule of reinforcement" and yes, that is true, but you still have to reinforce the behavior SOME of the time. You should really never stop using food or toy reinforcers in your training because when we are out in the real world with our dogs there are SO MANY other reinforcers in the environment.
Hope Balistreri
2025-06-23 03:06:18
Count answers: 15
You can stop using “treats,” if that’s what you used to get the behavior started, when the behavior is big and strong enough to carry the dog to reinforcers that are more likely to occur as a typical product of the behavior. Very often, when we are teaching a new skill, we use treats because we are breaking a bigger, more complex behavior down into small steps that don't produce any other clear benefit to the dog. As the skill is built, however, the dog can reach a point where they are able to do enough behavior to directly produce reinforcement. When the behavior will not bring the dog into contact with other reinforcers, keep using treats. We might say that dog “likes” brushing, but it is more helpful to recognize when holding still for brushing is reinforced by the feel of the brush going through the hair or down the back. This is less likely to happen with a needle poke, so you probably will still want to use treats for the same behavior of holding still when the outcome is a sharp jab in the butt. For instance, many dogs will initially try to escape or investigate any strange thing you touch them with, and in order to be able to even start to bring a brush, a stethoscope, or a needle toward them, you may need treats to reinforce small amounts of holding still.
Kristian Schroeder
2025-06-23 01:15:22
Count answers: 14
The short answer is that I never completely stop rewarding the dog. Just like people wouldn't continue working without a paycheck, we don't expect the dog to continue working without some kind of reward. The longer the dog has been doing a behavior, the more likely I am to use non-treat rewards: food bowl/toy, water, fetch, performing another behavior, tug of war, going outside, coming inside, etc. Once the dog is fluent with the basic behavior, I get picky. Instead of getting a treat for every single Down, she only get treats for the Downs that are really fast--slow ones don't count any more. Applied at the right time, this change to an intermittent schedule of reinforcement makes the behavior stronger and more reliable. Another example of an intermittent schedule of reinforcement would be asking for multiple behaviors in a row before delivering a reward.
Pierce Schmitt
2025-06-23 00:05:44
Count answers: 12
The answer to this question is NEVER. Really good trainers will never stop using food rewards. What they do is manage how often they use food in their training. When we start teaching a new behavior, we often reward the dog for just TRYING to perform the behavior. As it gains accuracy, we gradually wean the off successive approximation and back to rewarding when the dog performs correctly. Staying on continuous rewards too long, after the dog has learned the behavior, will always create problems. The solution is for trainers to move to VARIABLE and RANDOM rewards as soon as possible. When we feel the dog has reached fluency, we will test the dog. We will watch the dog's behavior by not rewarding 3 successful attempts. With this said, it is vitally important to understand that there is no reason to ever completely STOP using food in our training – not ever! We use food rewards on a random basis for the life of our dogs.
Yadira Muller
2025-06-22 23:19:45
Count answers: 12
I can phase out a lure but if I tell my dog to “leave it”, he comes running to me for a treat and if I don’t have one he goes back to doing the bad behavior which leads to me saying it again. I don’t want to have to treat my dog forever and I keep hearing “it will get better” or “it will phase out naturally as he gets older” but I’m wondering if anyone has any practical tips for this. One thing they don’t really teach you is how to phase this out. I’ve read all about positive reinforcement and we’ve been doing that.
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