Not Food Motivate Dog – How to Increase Food Motivation

Not Food Motivate Dog – How to Increase Food Motivation – Reward Based Dog Training Sydney

First, let me tell you that I have met only a few truly not food-motivated dogs in my 12 years of training dogs. 90% of the time a dog who didn’t seem food motivated simply wasn’t trained correctly. A few very common mistakes people make when using food as a reward are:

• Sticking to meal times on top of training with food: Results in over-feeding the dog. This lessens food motivation.
• Feeding the dog right before training them: This is like someone taking you to eat two dinners in a row.
• Using low-value training treats: This is something I can not explain enough. It’s like the difference between getting paid $10/h and getting paid $100/h. You would work a lot harder for that $100! The same applies to dogs, if you use high-value treats such as chicken, cheese, ham, Devon, Green Tripe etc. you will get a lot better results than from using just plain kibble or dry treats.
• Distractions make a difference: Learning something at home and being good at it there doesn’t mean a dog can do it around distractions. It’s as simple as that. And it might not have anything to do with the training treats, this is a distraction training challenge and will require an assessment of what is valuable to the dog and how to increase value to the things we need the dog to be better at.

So how to increase the value of food then?

1. Train with food rewards when the dog is hungry such as first thing in the morning.
2. Don’t feed from a bowl, make the dog work for food either through training or through interactive food toys/puzzles/scatter feeding.
3. Use high-value treats/food. You might have to trial and error a bit to find what your dog likes!
4. Maintain a healthy weight. Overweight dogs are less interested in food. You should feel the bones but not see them!
5. Play food games such as catching treats and chasing after them (there are even great training toys such as soft balls you can hide treats in!).
6. End all training sessions on a high when the dog is still engaged and interested in food. This creates excitement and motivation for training sessions.

And remember toys are great for training dogs as well, it doesn’t always have to be food! Any toys your dog loves will do!