One thing that I see a lot of while browsing training videos on social media is the ongoing battle between those who believe in using treats, and those who don’t.
We are always surprised when we encounter dog training sites where the trainer brags that they don’t ever use treats to train. We are surprised because we can’t imagine why anyone would brag about this. During the learning phase of training, there are two ways to help a dog understand what they are supposed to do:
1) find something that motivates the dog, and teach that the easiest way for them to get that thing is to perform a specific behavior.
2) Make the dog extremely uncomfortable, and teach them that the only way to make the discomfort stop is to perform a specific behavior.
The former approach will create a dog who is happy and eager to work for you, the latter will create a dog that is nervous and only performs out of fear.
Now, not all dogs are motivated my treats. Some prefer chasing a ball, some prefer affection (although there are not many dogs who will work for affection alone), some prefer playing a game of tug. So not all dogs should be trained with treats. However, to say that you never use treats, is basically saying that you make a lot of dogs perform out of fear of consequences.
With That point made, there is another argument to be made here. Even if you don’t hold it to be true that treats are necessary in some dogs to maintain a good attitude toward training, think about this: if your goal as a dog trainer is to teach the dog a new command the quickest and easiest way (I do not believe that faster is always better, but one of the arguments in support of punishment based training is that it works faster), then if your dog is super motivated by food why wouldn’t you use it? You are only doing yourself a disservice.
The bottom line is that the more motivated a dog is, the faster they learn. So even if you are a traditionalist who teaches new commands using only punishment, if you where to also reward the dog with treats when they do the right thing, they will learn much faster. So, again, by bragging that you never use treats, you are basically saying that at least sometimes, you are not training as fast and efficiently as is possible.