FOOD MOTIVATION IS JUST MOTIVATION THAT TASTES GOOD

Food can be a powerful tool when used to reinforce newly trained behaviours. I use food reinforcement all the time when I begin introducing basic obedience commands to a food motivated dog. Food reinforcement increases the likelihood of a dog repeating a behaviour. So, if food is given to reward a ‘sit’ the dog will likely start offering the ‘sit’ more readily.

However, food can also be an impediment if it’s used incorrectly in the presence of unwanted behaviours like reactivity. If food is given when mental arousal or reactivity is present (as a distraction, redirection, or bribe), then the dog will also start offering more mental arousal or reactivity more readily.

A highly food motivated dog means that we can leverage his food drive to reinforce his great work when introducing new obedience skills. Food work is excellent in the beginning to introduce a new obedience command but it isn’t reliable and food work completely depends on the dogs desire for the food... meaning that if your dog isn’t hungry/isn’t food motivated/is too distracted to care about food then you’re up the creek! This is just one of the reasons why we we use remote collar communication to train dogs because it is the training approach that creates reliability in our commands and doesn’t depend on the dog having food drive! It’s certainly wonderful to leverage food drive when possible, but some dogs just don’t care about the snacks so in those cases we simply train the dog without it using our communication based training approach!