There is nothing worse than trying to do right by your dog and making them overweight because of training. You can also actually make things worse by using treats. 

In today's episode, I want to show you exactly what it means to be rewarding too long and what happens when you take the treats out of your hand. AND how to fix when your dog only listens when you have treats. All of that and more in the Acknowledge Dogs Podcast.

Get started with training at https://www.matadork9.com/coaching

Free Training Guide on Resolving Bad Habits

https://www.matadork9.com/resolvingbadhabits

00;00;01;08 - 00;00;35;15
Michael J. Accetta
Welcome. My name is Michael, etc.. I'm the founder of Matador Canine Brilliance and author of The Dog Training Cheat Codes You're listening to the Acknowledge Dogs Podcast Drop the treats. Get rid of them. Get rid of all rewards. All treats. Get them out of the training picture. Get out of that mindset. Why would I say that? I'm a professional dog trainer who uses positive reinforcement daily.

00;00;36;02 - 00;00;56;14
Michael J. Accetta
Why would I tell you to get rid of the treats I'm your host. Michael is author of The Dog Training. She Codes. Host of the Acknowledged Dogs podcast and founder of Matador Canine Brilliance. Today we're talking about what happens when you hoard treats, you hold them in your hand. Your dog starts to learn where the treats coming from, when the treats are there, when they're not there.

00;00;56;14 - 00;01;14;27
Michael J. Accetta
We're going to guide a little bit more into it. But did you know that you can actually train your dog through positive reinforcement and still end some behaviors? You don't have to punish them. And to help you out I wrote a free PDF guide called Resolving Complicated Bad Habits Without Using Punishment. The link is in the description. You can download that.

00;01;14;29 - 00;01;38;02
Michael J. Accetta
Absolutely free. It's a nice short read, but it is packed with useful information, so make sure you take advantage of that. I have seen way too many times over the thousands of dogs that I've trained over the thousands of dogs I've trained away to many times where the owner has practiced for weeks. You're getting so much success. And then we take the treats away, or they don't have treats or they don't have the ball, whatever it is.

00;01;38;12 - 00;02;01;27
Michael J. Accetta
And the dog completely forgets what they should be doing. This happens way too much, and you've just wasted weeks of time that you've worked with your dog. Simply because they now know what the difference is between working and not working. So why does this happen? Why are dogs so smart Well, we don't want them to be. And they play dumb when we want them to be smart, and you're trying to teach about them.

00;02;02;09 - 00;02;29;08
Michael J. Accetta
And they're like, Nope, I'm just going to keep taking my treats. But of course, they can be really smart and they are very smart, so they pick up on these things. What happens is dogs learn what's called stimulus control. So people refer to it as generalization, becoming really specific. I like to label it under stimulus control. Stimulus control is when a behavior happens, when it's supposed to happen doesn't happen.

00;02;29;08 - 00;02;50;09
Michael J. Accetta
When it's not supposed to happen, it happens in response to a particular cue. Right. If I say sit, my dog will sit in. Does not happen when a different cue is presented. So I say downward dog wouldn't sit. Also, the behavior set wouldn't happen when I said the word down. So there's kind of four criteria there that lock in that stimulus control.

00;02;50;09 - 00;03;10;17
Michael J. Accetta
Now, the same thing goes for when our dogs are training just in general. Okay. We're going to train when I have the trip back, John. We're not training when I don't have the trip pouch. I'll see how very quickly our dogs can learn what the difference is right when a treat pouches on when my hand is in my pocket, when I have the ball sticking out of my back pocket.

00;03;11;07 - 00;03;33;18
Michael J. Accetta
All of those things tell our dog that there is opportunity for reinforcement. And when there is an opportunity for reinforcement, they forget what they're doing because it's not in the same context. Classic example I always give to my client is I want you to think about a kid in school. You ask them their timetable multiplication and you say six times five, they go, boom.

00;03;33;18 - 00;04;02;08
Michael J. Accetta
35 you go six times. Well, they do 72. I know what's up with today and six, but that's what I'm thinking about. So they can very quickly, boom, they got the math application. The math application the multiplication in math, because they are learning in the environment and being tested in the environment of which they learned to take the same kid, go to Disney land, ask him five time six guarantee it'll be longer, it'll take them more effort to get the number.

00;04;02;29 - 00;04;24;22
Michael J. Accetta
Now, if you practice in all these different environments, sure, they get really good at multiplication. And maybe that's a very specific, specific situation where kids wouldn't learn how to do it in Disneyland. But most of the time the kids are just too overstimulated and excited to be thinking about math. Asked them to do a Declaration of Independence, recited There's no way that's going to happen if they learned it in school.

00;04;24;22 - 00;04;48;12
Michael J. Accetta
Of course, if they haven't learned it, it's not going to help them either way. Getting on a little bit of a tangent here, boy being dogs learn specific situations mean one thing, and if the specific criteria isn't there, it means something else. If you don't have treats, I'm not going to listen if you're not going to guide me around, this is what a problem I have with lowering the tree in your hand.

00;04;49;12 - 00;05;05;29
Michael J. Accetta
This is the big point of today's episode. Don't lower your dog if you take nothing else away. This is the point that you should take. Stop lowering your dog. We're going to go over how to teach your dog and what to do so that they're not following treats and they're not creating this kind of problem now a little bit.

00;05;06;12 - 00;05;20;15
Michael J. Accetta
But what I need to get through to your head right now, stop lowering your dog Thank you for listening to the Acknowledged Dogs podcast. Subscribe to this podcast, leave a review and connect with me on your favorite social media platform.

00;05;24;03 - 00;05;52;27
Michael J. Accetta
So every social media trainer that I see every single day is lowering their dog. One of the greatest social media marketers when it comes to dog training. And I will mention who it is. They teach classes in competition styled obedience, and they do a lot of lowering a ridiculous amount of long. And oftentimes that would be fine. I would be okay.

00;05;53;03 - 00;06;09;11
Michael J. Accetta
You don't do your little lowering, but then they teach more people how to do it, which means more people are going to have the problem that I'm talking about today where their dog does not do it if you don't lower them or does not do it if you don't have treats in their face my reactivity course that's available at training got mad at auction icon.

00;06;09;24 - 00;06;29;18
Michael J. Accetta
My reactivity course specifically goes against which so many clients are told about reactivity. Oh, your dog is staring at something. Put treats in front of their face and have them turn around. What happens when you don't have tricks? What happens when the dog doesn't like the treats? This is a classic example of people fighting against the positive reinforcement side.

00;06;29;18 - 00;06;47;02
Michael J. Accetta
The cookie pushers, as they say, Oh, you're just putting treats in front of their face or cookies. In front of their face. Actually, what we should be doing is rewarding the choice to have them turn towards us, which is what I do in the reactivity course. So if your dog is reactive, head over to training that Matador can ICOM sign up for the activity course.

00;06;47;09 - 00;07;08;23
Michael J. Accetta
You can also sign up with me to do some coaching that's training. That Matador can icon slash six week coaching and I'll actually walk you through the course one on one. But to look at the differences here, I want my dog to not become reliant on the treats do not become reliant on food or a toy or any other reward.

00;07;09;15 - 00;07;26;20
Michael J. Accetta
Yes, I'm going to use it. I'm going to use it to teach them the behavior I want and I'm not going to eliminate rewards and I have no way of telling them they did a good job, but I don't want them to become reliant on it. So the first thing you can do, the first thing you can do is start shaping behaviors instead of lowering them.

00;07;27;06 - 00;07;46;15
Michael J. Accetta
Now, shaping is just selecting behaviors that are slowly getting closer to the ultimate goal. Right? Successful approximation is what we call it. So if I want my dog to go sit on their bed, I'm going to mark with a clicker, a conditioned reinforcement, a mark for them getting their front paw on the bed. And I'm not boring at the same time.

00;07;46;16 - 00;08;10;18
Michael J. Accetta
This is a big confusion. Oh, well, I'll just mark when their front pockets on the bed, but I'm going to lure them there the condition reinforcer doesn't matter. At that point, a conditional reinforcer has to come before the primary reinforcer or the reward reinforce or you're trying to condition. So the clicker, a mark comes before the treat. They'll make the association.

00;08;11;04 - 00;08;31;13
Michael J. Accetta
If it doesn't, if they come at the same time or the treats first and then the conditioned reinforcer one, it's not really technically a conditioned reinforcer. And two, they don't make the association. They don't think that that click means anything, and you can damage a really strong, conditioned reinforcer if you do this. So if you're going to lure your dog, you have to lower your dog.

00;08;31;25 - 00;08;47;05
Michael J. Accetta
Really, the only situation I see in is if you need to teach a very complex maneuver, you have to manipulate their body or you're doing fitness equipment. So dogs aren't a fitness equipment and you're trying to get my new adjustments to work on fitness right there. They're small little muscles that we need to engage, that kind of thing.

00;08;47;14 - 00;09;11;29
Michael J. Accetta
That's when I'll use Lauren. But really, you should switch over to shaping. If you switch over to shaping, your dog is no longer becoming reliant on the treats. If you're going to use lowering get rid of the clicker. If you have to use Laurie for exercise, if you have to use layering for those tiny movements, get rid of the clicker and added in later.

00;09;12;08 - 00;09;32;04
Michael J. Accetta
But I guarantee you're going to run into the same problem. You're going to lower your dog a little bit, get the behavior that you want, and now you have no way of starting that unless you start phasing out the law. And that just add so much more time. Teach it through shaping first work your shaping muscle. It is a muscle to try to think about, okay, how can I take this giant behavior?

00;09;32;04 - 00;10;01;05
Michael J. Accetta
Break it down into a really manageable step so that my dog can get good at it. If they can get good at that good. Now we can move on to the next step. We can move on to the next one. If they can't get good at it, I can't move forward. But the more you do this, the more your dog does this, the faster you're going to learn Overall, one of my favorite stories it's in and one of Karen Pryor's books, she had done a seminar and the owner had a I'm a 16 week old puppy.

00;10;02;00 - 00;10;23;15
Michael J. Accetta
And after introducing clicker training, this puppy was able to do every single obedience command and multiple tricks in one night. The dog loved learning so much it could just keep going and it could do more things it because the owner was able to instruct the dog perfectly which sounds baffling to me. They just had such a good understanding right away.

00;10;23;23 - 00;10;58;24
Michael J. Accetta
This puppy learns so many things. Sit down, heel walking, nice on leash, spin jump bark, all of those things. This puppy was able to do so. And yet people who laud their dogs can take years and the dog still doesn't know what it should be doing. That's a problem for me. That's a problem. Why would why would I, as a professional dog trainer, recommend to you something that I've seen happen way too often where a dog is just lured for years and they never get the picture, they never understand what they're supposed to be doing.

00;10;59;12 - 00;11;29;22
Michael J. Accetta
Shape it. And you can do it all in one night. You can do it all in one session if you're really good, depending on the complexity of the behavior. So why does this happen this happens because dogs learn very quickly specific situations and scenarios in where they're going to get rewarded when they're not going to get rewarded. When you take the treat away, when you hide it, when you put it in different pockets, when you put it off to the side in a mason jar, mark over here, get your dog, do the right thing, Mark, then go get the treat.

00;11;30;09 - 00;11;52;23
Michael J. Accetta
You teach them that you are important. The mark is important, not the treat itself. And if you stop lowering if you completely get rid of luring, illusory and luring, if you get rid of that, where the treats in your hand guiding the dog around, get rid of that right now. And work out the training muscle in your brain of how to split behavior down in marker.

00;11;52;23 - 00;12;18;07
Michael J. Accetta
Reward those tiny steps. If you can do that, your dog will be much better off in the long term creativity wise when it comes to so problem-solving learning new skills picking better choices and options so you don't have to constantly intervene. All of that happens when your dog knows how to get reinforcement without being prompted otherwise. They just sit there.

00;12;18;29 - 00;12;37;19
Michael J. Accetta
I literally seen dogs just sit there and stare at you. You could say Sit all you want. They're not doing anything until you put your hand up and this is where some people say, Oh, well, my dog responds really well to hand signals. You're absolutely right because that's considered a prompt, just like a treat would be. We're prompting them into the right direction.

00;12;37;25 - 00;12;55;18
Michael J. Accetta
But once you take those prompts away, they've got nothing. It's as if you didn't see anything. And if if my cue is going to be a word, I say the word sit my dog sit. If my cue is going to be a word, and I want them to respond. If I don't say anything, they don't do anything It's the exact same thing.

00;12;55;18 - 00;13;18;20
Michael J. Accetta
And for whatever reason, we as human beings treat them as two separate things. They're not two separate entities. They are all together. A cue tells our dog what to do, and in many cases, the treat in your hand is the cue, so everything else doesn't matter. Some dogs get hyper fixated. They put blinders on, and they only focus on the treat like their eyes roll back in their head.

00;13;18;20 - 00;13;36;10
Michael J. Accetta
And they're just, I want the treat. Labs do this now and let's do it with toys. And it's good to have that kind of motivation. But I'd much rather switch that motivation to me, have them looking towards me, engaging with me, working with me, and then I magically produce treats afterwards, after they've done the thing that I want.

00;13;36;18 - 00;13;53;02
Michael J. Accetta
I'm not going to use treats to get them to do it. I'm going to mark the behavior they've done and I'm going to reward them afterwards. That's what you need to do. And that's what happens when you take the treat out of your hand. Your dog just stops. I don't want that to happen to you. I want to see your progress with your dog in a timely fashion.

00;13;53;02 - 00;14;15;10
Michael J. Accetta
You shouldn't be training for years unless you want to, but if you get through the fundamentals and I say this all the time, if you get through the fundamentals in an effective way, you've learned the skills and your dog is now prepared to teach anything else you want to teach, any trick, any environmental stimulus you want to work on, any competition you want to do becomes ten times easier if you start sooner.

00;14;15;22 - 00;14;35;00
Michael J. Accetta
I mean, if a dog has bad habits, they're going to stay bad habits longer. If you start sooner because you worked on the effectiveness in your fundamentals, you've worked on your skills, your dog knows the fundamentals really well. Then they're younger when they're learning these things, but really what ends up happening is you have a stronger relationship and your dog is more creative.

00;14;35;02 - 00;14;53;20
Michael J. Accetta
They can solve problems easier. That makes it much easier for you to do any competition work that you wanted to do. There's been a short episode today. I hope you appreciate it. I hope you take this information and go apply it to day. Go use it right now if you if you can, if you're driving or dissecting rats or something, then clearly don't use it.

00;14;54;11 - 00;15;12;01
Michael J. Accetta
But if you are going to use it today, make sure you take notes. I don't say this enough. You guys got to take notes. It's something that I struggled with in the beginning and I learned the hard way. It's actually the first chapter in the dog training Chico that's available at Mount Auction. Icon is the first chapter in Mad at Arcane Incan.

00;15;12;11 - 00;15;30;24
Michael J. Accetta
And I'm actually going to put in the description. I'm giving away the first chapter for free. So if you want to read the first chapter about keeping really good notes so you can progress faster with your dog, click the link in the description and go read it today when you have lunch, when you're having dinner, when you're kind of trying to calm down and cool off before bed.

00;15;31;09 - 00;15;34;12
Michael J. Accetta
Enjoy that and I'll see you guys next time. Thanks for listening.

00;15;42;17 - 00;15;50;05
Michael J. Accetta
Thank you for listening to the Acknowledged Dogs podcast. Subscribe to this podcast, leave a review and connect with me on your favorite social media platform.

00;15;53;23 - 00;15;54;05
Michael J. Accetta
So