Fading Treats – Remote Rewards

Treat Training is one of the best ways to teach behaviors to our dogs during the formative, luring and shaping phase.  But, at some point we need to fade those treats and get a dog’s compliance.  We can choose to reward later through praise, toy or even with a treat reward, BUT it should not dictate if a dog will or won’t listen.

In this online dog training lesson I cover the way I “fade rewards” to maintain focus and be fair to the dog.  This can be done with a puppy or adult dog.  But at some point it must be done with every dog, or else you’ll have a dog that was taught to only work when a treat is present.

Your goal is to get the treats off of your body, yet maintain your dog’s focus on you.  In essence you are now shifting the dog’s attention from the REWARD to the PERSON who Provides the REWARD!  This is a very fair way to transition a dog, even a very treat focused dog.

You’ll see that in this lesson I use corrections as well as rewards to make clear that I want to reward the dog, but he must work for that reward.  Using fair corrections to help a dog learn and coupling that with rewards for a job well done will help a dog learn!