Rewarding Vs Bribing

Often occurs the question if by rewarding our dog during training I am creating a habit or even a dependency, which will be difficult to break later on and my dog will stop listening to me when I don't have rewards/treats with me.

The answer is YES, as long as you use the treats as a bribe and not a reward.

The difference is huge, especially for our dog.

While in one case the prize is present and obvious and depending on its value to the competitor (dog), he will try hard enough, less or not at all.

- How many times have you asked your dog to come back to you and when he sees you have kibble instead of the high value treat he was expecting, he runs away from you?

- There have certainly been cases where while you show him even a high value treat, he chooses to follow another stimulus that excites him more (cats, other dogs, etc.).

In the case of rewarding, we operate differently.

- Our dog cooperates with the motivation that he will receive a reward, since this is not present and certainly not obvious.

- The reward will come upon the completion of the requested behavior and not before.

- Its value will be fluctuating and not fixed, i.e. according to the difficulty of the requested behavior I will award a prize of a similar value.

This way has multiple benefits. If it has been worked correctly then after some time I can start changing parameters in my rewarding such as the frequency (Partial Reinforcement) and the volume of it.

If the dog does not receive a reward for a behavior, this will not only discourage him from stopping the effort, but will instead make him try harder the next time to win the reward.