Rewarding your dog

In classes, some people ask us – ‘when can I stop rewarding my dog?’ The honest answer to this is ‘never’, because your dog will continue to need motivation to keep doing certain behaviours that you want them to do, especially when they are things that are opposite to their natural inclinations.  

With clicker training, if you click you have to treat, but, your treats can be really small (so your dog isn’t going to get fat), providing that your treats are interesting enough to your dog, and that you remember that they have to compete with the distractions of the environment. As a general rule of thumb ‘good treats get good behaviours and rubbish treats get rubbish behaviours’!

Even at times when either you don’t have your clicker or you can’t or don’t want to use it, your dog still needs praise and encouragement to let them know that they have done something good that you like.