17/10/2026
Why do we use food in training?
Because food is useful.
It’s easy to deliver, we can use lots of very small rewards, and importantly, we can be really precise about the behaviour we are reinforcing.
But using food doesn’t automatically make training effective.
Timing matters. If the reward comes too early, or too late, we may not be reinforcing the behaviour we thought we were. I've seen some awful behaviours being inadvertently reinforced with food, through either inexperience in regard to timing or a lack of understanding of what is actually being reinforced.
Frequency matters too. Particularly when something is new, we often need to reinforce far more than people expect. If the dog gets one food reward for getting it right, but the environment provides twenty other interesting things in the meantime, we probably haven’t tipped the balance in our favour!
Then there's generalisation.....
A dog who can do something beautifully in the kitchen hasn’t necessarily learnt to do the same thing in a field, on a pavement, around other dogs or somewhere full of exciting smells. We need to build those distractions gradually rather than taking a new behaviour straight into the most difficult situation and wondering why it falls apart.
And training takes time.
Real behaviour change usually comes from lots of small repetitions, practised over days, weeks and months. Ten minutes in a training class once a week can teach you how to train something, but the learning happens through what you do in between.
Food is just one part of that process.
Good training is about timing, reinforcement, setting the environment up properly, understanding what motivates the individual dog, and putting enough practice in for the behaviour to become reliable.
Sometimes when training isn't working, we don't need a different dog, or even a different method.
We need to look more closely at the actual training.
Training with some supervision is important. Someone who has the experience to make tiny tweaks to your timing, food delivery, or training criteria, can make a huge difference to your training success.
