The age old argument of to use food or not to use food in dog training rages on.
I believe using food to teach behaviour is by far the best way for the dog to learn.
However, understanding how to use properly to teach a desired behaviour is the question.
Here I go over the 3 methods of using food in training.
Always remember, when using food, try to use food that is really tasty, something the dog loves, and make the rewards, very small so not to fill the dog up.
1.
Luring This is probably the easiest to understand.
This is a simple process of using a small morsel of food and using it to lure the dog into a position.
The sit for example is a process of putting the food tidbit above the eye line of the dog and move it back until it's bottom hits the ground.
When it does sit, you then reward.
Any obedience exercise can be trained using luring.
2.
Shaping Shaping involves rewarding the dog when it samples behaviour.
This is very similar to how mammal trainers train dolphins.
They look for the behaviour to occur naturally, then reward that behaviour with a fish.
They use a whistle as an even marker to let them know the exact moment that earned the fish.
We can use the same methodology in training our dogs.
We can use our voice as praise to let the dog know when it has done the thing we want or we can use a clicker.
I will talk about that in another article.
We can shape our dog to retrieve a toy, or the paper.
We start in getting the dog interested in the thing we want it to retrieve and we note the different types of interest we get.
We only reward the behaviour that resembles what we want.
With consequent training session, we then raise the bar and only reward better behaviours.
After a few session, we are then rewarding only those behaviours that we actually want.
We have gradually shaped the dog into doing what we want.
3.
Targeting Targeting is a technique where we train the dog to touch or go to a certain point.
We can do this with shaping the dog to touch the end of a stick or our hand.
When it does, it gets the food reward.
This could be useful in teaching a dog to heal nicely behind our hand, or if you wanted the dog to shut a cupboard or a door.
This is especially useful if you need to send the dog away from you to perform a behaviour.
You could teach it to target a marker on your hand or end of a stick.
Then move the marker further and further away and put the command to move away on cue.
This is of course a brief overview of the 3 types of training using food.
I will be going over in much more detail on my site about how to do this training in more detail.
I believe using food to teach behaviour is by far the best way for the dog to learn.
However, understanding how to use properly to teach a desired behaviour is the question.
Here I go over the 3 methods of using food in training.
Always remember, when using food, try to use food that is really tasty, something the dog loves, and make the rewards, very small so not to fill the dog up.
1.
Luring This is probably the easiest to understand.
This is a simple process of using a small morsel of food and using it to lure the dog into a position.
The sit for example is a process of putting the food tidbit above the eye line of the dog and move it back until it's bottom hits the ground.
When it does sit, you then reward.
Any obedience exercise can be trained using luring.
2.
Shaping Shaping involves rewarding the dog when it samples behaviour.
This is very similar to how mammal trainers train dolphins.
They look for the behaviour to occur naturally, then reward that behaviour with a fish.
They use a whistle as an even marker to let them know the exact moment that earned the fish.
We can use the same methodology in training our dogs.
We can use our voice as praise to let the dog know when it has done the thing we want or we can use a clicker.
I will talk about that in another article.
We can shape our dog to retrieve a toy, or the paper.
We start in getting the dog interested in the thing we want it to retrieve and we note the different types of interest we get.
We only reward the behaviour that resembles what we want.
With consequent training session, we then raise the bar and only reward better behaviours.
After a few session, we are then rewarding only those behaviours that we actually want.
We have gradually shaped the dog into doing what we want.
3.
Targeting Targeting is a technique where we train the dog to touch or go to a certain point.
We can do this with shaping the dog to touch the end of a stick or our hand.
When it does, it gets the food reward.
This could be useful in teaching a dog to heal nicely behind our hand, or if you wanted the dog to shut a cupboard or a door.
This is especially useful if you need to send the dog away from you to perform a behaviour.
You could teach it to target a marker on your hand or end of a stick.
Then move the marker further and further away and put the command to move away on cue.
This is of course a brief overview of the 3 types of training using food.
I will be going over in much more detail on my site about how to do this training in more detail.
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