Yeah, I didn’t word that very well did I?
Just wanting to point out that if you’re having to refresh a behavior every month or so, the behavior isn’t well learned let alone proofed.
I see both sides. I mean, if you have to feed your dog to get a behavior what’s the big deal right? Its not like you’re never going to feed the dog anyway (as opposed to hitting).
But on the other side, this is where this kind of training gets a bad rap and where it ends up “failing†with dogs who aren’t motivated enough by food to be bribed. Its the anti PR crowd’s line - Sure, I’ll sit in this chair if you give me $10 bucks each time I do it, but if there’s a $100 bill on the ceiling, your $10 just lost its value.
Then of course there are those who will bribe the dog to do something the dog doesn’t want to do and very quickly you end up with a dog who not only won’t fall for the bribe, but may also end up refusing to take food from you period.
Our Lunar was like this, I’m sure related to him being caught with food. It took me nearly a year to teach him to work for food.
This is a great article about the dangers of this kind of this sort of thing (I’m sure a lot of you have seen it already.):
http://lifeasahuman.com/2011/pets/some-dogs-wont-work-for-food/
I think a lot of people don’t realize that PR training isn’t about the dog working for food so much as the dog working to
figure out how to make the food happen. The more I work with my guys and watch others work with their dogs, the more it seems to me that dogs really enjoy figuring things out.
I think its very closely related to the seeking/hunting behavior Temple Grandin talks about that activates a pleasure part of the brain.
Then eventually the value of figuring things out gets transferred to simply working with you because you represent that reward.