Using A Variety Of Dog Treats (And Some Of What I Use) To Keep Training Effective, Engaging, And Fun

Keeping training effective, engaging, and fun starts with using a variety of dog treats, so I'm sharing some of what I use (and you might like to try) along with a link to my Tasty Treats Recipe Ebook.
Transcript:
Let's talk about all the rewards that I might use and that you could use. I mean, I'm not— there’s probably a katrillion different pieces of food that you could choose to use, but let's just group them into general categories.

So, there's fruits and vegetables. So, I might use cut up pieces of carrot or blueberries. Possibly freeze dried, possibly fresh. I have used frozen blueberries as well. There's others like fruits and vegetables like maybe green beans. It depends what I have on hand or apples. Now I will rarely train my dog with just fruits and vegetables.

They might be mixed in with other things. And you have to be careful because some of these fruits and vegetables are pretty high in sugar. And then there's meat, which is what dogs really want let's face it. And there's various forms of meat. So, you can get freeze dried meat, which is like a lot of times you'll get things like beef lung. It's kind of like the old sponge toffee that we used to buy as a kid, not at all alike, but it's the same texture as what I was getting at. There's freeze dried meats, there's dehydrated, which I think are more attractive generally than freeze dried. Freeze dried, often you might get freeze dried liver, freeze dried lung.

I mean, we have a freeze dryer, so we freeze dry any kind of meat. So, there's freeze dried, there's dehydrated, there's cooked meats, which we commonly use. And then there's fresh raw meats, which I rarely use, but I have used on occasion raw stewing beef. You have to be careful, hygiene, washing hands, washing all the surfaces. You know what I mean.

So those are the typical presentations of the meats. So also, I will cook meat, when I say “I” it's the royal I, somebody here will cook like tuna brownies is a favorite. We have all different recipes. We'll leave a link in the show notes if you'd like a recipe to some of the normal rotational cookies that I use in my training. But it might be the fish that I might use. I would more often put them into some sort of treat like anchovies or canned sardines or canned tuna. Those are the things that would go into a training. And again, my dogs love those too. So, I would use, you know, any kind of meat you can think of.

Beef, turkey, chicken. We use bison and venison is what Swagger - one of Swagger’s highest value rewards. Buffalo, you see kangaroo a lot now, not like around in the backyard, but you can buy it. So, there's all different kinds and something like kibble, or we use some freeze-dried dog food. It's like raw food that's been made into these little kibble presentations.

So those would be probably above fruits and vegetables, but nowhere near anything that's more of a meat form. So, the order for my dogs, freeze dried is the lowest and then it goes dehydrated, cooked and fresh or raw. All right. So those are the hierarchy. If I was giving the motivational currency to my dogs, I know that's what it is. Now I know tripe is the king for my puppy in particular. But for most of my dogs, I won't touch tripe. It's disgusting.

I will however, train with some freeze dried, or you can buy some trait training treats. They smell rude, but they're like Nirvana for my dog, so. That's what I'm talking about. There's all the different types of treats that you can use. And I would guess in this household right now, if I was to go around to the various training bowls that are in this household, I would probably find at least 10 different types of treats. Some are refrigerated that only come out for actual training and then others that are around the house for kind of instantaneous training.

Okay. So, I don't train with one kind of treat because I know I've seen the downfall of that.