01/02/2024
There are many factors to consider when selecting rewards in training your dog. This article outlines a few misconceptions owners may have about dogs who appear to not be food motivated.
BUT MY DOG IS NOT INTERESTED IN FOOD!
We rewards-based trainers use food a lot in training. It's great for precision behaviours, for neatness and for those moments when toys would add to excitement.
Being able to eat in a variety of situations and contexts can often be a learned skill, but it's often a very helpful one. It can help us keep our dog's focus on us. We can use it to teach skills. We can use it to help them feel better about the scary stuff in life.
But there are a lot of people who say their dogs are not motivated by food.
If that's you, here are five common reasons why...
1. You're using low grade food. I mean break out the good stuff, Alphonse! Does it come from the chiller cabinet in a top-end butchers or does it come from a dusty shelf with a sell-by date on it that's 5 years from now? If you want behaviour from your dog, ask yourself how much you really want it.
2. You're using the same food all the time. We habituate to taste and it gets boring. This is especially true if your dog is a teenager. Keep it varied and watch their engagement pop back again. When dogs know precisely what's coming, it can be very disincentivising. When they just know *something* good is coming, it keeps their brain open to learning. We've all eaten our way to the bottom of a box of Quality Street and thought we'll never be able to face another Quality Street in our lives, haven't we? And then what happens the next day? Being used to the same type of food is one way to really kill its value, especially with dogs who have a finer palette.
3. Your dog is not used to eating everywhere. I grew up in a strict family. You ate at the table. You didn't snack. If you did snack, you sat down and you had a plate like civilised people. It took me a while to get past eating things out of packets on the move. Now it feels like that's all I ever did and I'm finding it hard to eat at the table again. It feels weird. Eating is a habit. This is especially true for dogs who are much more contextual learners than we are. If it'd feel weird for you to have pudding for starters and soup for breakfast, realise how much weirder it may feel for your dog if they're used to only eating in particular circumstances and build up an 'eat-anywhere' habit.
4. Your dog is in a state of acute stress. Chronic stress can go either way: some of us mammals overeat when we're chronically stressed and others among us lose our appetite. Acute stress is the one state where literally nobody wants to eat. If you're being chased by a bear, you're not thinking about when you're going to stop for your picnic. Reduce the stress and don't put the onus on the dog to be calm. You're the human with the big brain, so find some ways to make it less stressful for your dog. Our appetite is often a barometer to our feelings.
5. You're asking too much. When things get hard, when our dog is uncertain, when they're not clear on what's being asked or we're asking for 97 behaviours for one reward, it can be frustrating for our dogs, so they just give up.
These are just some of the reasons why dogs might seem not to be as interested in food, but these are often the main five. Building eating habits, using high value food, keeping it varied, asking for simpler behaviours and making sure our dog feels comfortable are the easiest ways we can address these problems and watch our dog's interest in food sky rocket.
