When Can I Stop Using Treats In Dog Training?

Extinction is a very important aspect of animal behavior because it ensures that animals don’t waste precious time and calories on activities that bear no benefit. 

Modern dog trainers tend to use a combination of reinforcement (rewarding good behaviors) and extinction to control changes in their dog’s behavior.

Extinguishing bad behaviors

Achieving extinction in training out bad behaviors can be challenging, because often when we think there is no reward, something is happening which is actually reinforcing the dog’s behavior. 

You might think that you are not rewarding your dog for ignoring your recall whistle. But if he is happy sniffing around in the grass instead of running towards you, then he is being rewarded by the environment. In this situation extinction of the bad behavior (ignoring the whistle) will not take place, and the dog will ignore you again in the future. 

Extinguishing good behaviors

Unfortunately the opposite to extinguishing bad behaviors is not challenging at all. It’s horribly easy to extinguish the great behaviors you have created in your dog, be it your nice snappy recall at the dog park, or that nice basket ‘stay’ while you load your dishwasher. 

All you have to do is stop reinforcing the nice behaviors. And watch them wither away. 

Don’t get me wrong. This doesn’t happen overnight. A dog that has been well trained in recall or stay may carry on doing both for many months. Though often, extinction will take place much faster.

It’s important to remember that reinforcement is the lifeblood of behavior. For you, for your dog, and for all animals. You would not carry on going to work if your boss never paid you  You might put up with their excuses for a week or two, a month even. But then you’d be like “where’s my money”!  And before long you’d quit. 

No-one and no dog will carry on carrying out a behavior over and over again if there is no benefit to it. 

Reinforcement is as essential as the air you breathe. And if that recall you prize so highly is never reinforced, it will die. Not today, probably not this week. But it will die.

So, if a behavior will die if it’s never reinforced, what about the frequency of reinforcement? 

Do we have to reinforce every single recall for example? What about the gambling effect? Isn’t it true that intermittent and unpredictable reinforcements are more powerful than reinforcing every single time? 

Isn’t that why people love slot machines and poker?

The gambling effect

It’s true that unpredictable, intermittent, rewards can be powerful. This has been proven in laboratory experiments with animals, and has been well observed in gambling addicts. 

However, there is some argument about how well the gambling effect works in dog training simply because there is so much variation in the factors involved in each cue that we give our dogs. 

If you call your dog the same way, in the same place, at the same time, in the same weather, you could almost certainly sharpen up your recall using the gambling effect.  But that is rarely going to happen. Some recalls will take place under much more challenging conditions than others and in very different situations it may be that we need consistent reinforcement rather than intermittent and unpredictable rewards.  

The jury is still out on this one. But many trainers now think that in many cases a continuous schedule of reinforcement – in other words reinforcing every single behavior – is the safest course of action. 

So what do we know?

What we do know is this: 

• Behavior that is reinforced will increase
• Behavior that is punished will diminish
• Behavior that results in no outcome, will extinguish. 

Those are the three ways in which behavioral change takes place.  So if you have created a good behavior that you want your dog to keep repeating for the rest of their life, you need to reinforce it. 

You may be able to get away with reinforcing it less often, but you will still need to reinforce it often enough to keep the behavior alive and kicking!

Now how you reinforce it is entirely up to you.  But your options are fairly limited. In fact there are only two of them!

You have two options

• Reinforce your dog’s good behavior using food
• Reinforce your dog’s good behavior using an alternative to food. 

I hope we are clear now that not reinforcing your dog’s good behavior will result in the extinction of that behavior. And all your hard work, and progress, will be lost. 

Let’s also be clear, that if you are not going to use food as a reinforcer for your dog’s behavior, you’d better have a great alternative to hand. 

Alternatives to training treats

Because my own dogs are hunting companions and I teach them all to retrieve, this is a wonderful option for me.  Almost all dogs love retrieving if properly introduced to it without force or fear. If retrieving appeals to you, my Fetch course (launching summer 2025) takes you through the retrieving process step by step and is suitable for all healthy dogs, young and old. 

But at home, especially indoors, you need to think about other alternatives if you no longer want to use training treats. The important thing to remember is that your reward is only reinforcing if the dog considers it to be valuable. 

And the hard truth is that a pat or a kind word is simply not sufficiently reinforcing enough, for most dogs, to establish, or most importantly to sustain, great behaviors.  

A game of tug on the other hand can be a great reinforcer if your dog enjoys it. We’ll talk about teaching dogs to play tug safely another time. But it does have a downside, and its one that’s shared by many alternative reinforcers. And that’s simply the time it takes to deliver the reward. 

Playing tug is great fun, but it’s much more time consuming than swallowing a treat. Now this doesn’t matter later in training when the dog is carrying out more complex and time consuming tasks, and when reinforcements are less frequently needed. But in early training, the more repetitions you fit into your games, the quicker your dog is going to learn. And food is your absolute ally in this situation. 

When can you stop using training treats?

So the answer to the original question is going to be, either when you have an alternative reinforcer to offer your dog that is of equal or higher value. 

Or when you no longer care whether or not your dog obeys that particular cue. 

If you don’t reinforce sufficiently often or sufficiently well, your trained behavior will eventually die. So if you want your dog to carry on responding to the recall, for example, then many trainers nowadays would advise you to reinforce most if not all recalls with something tasty.  

And I recommend that if you regularly walk your dog off leash, you provide at least one powerful high value reward for a successful recall during each walk, and provide a super awesome reward such as multiple chunks of roast chicken or beef chunks at least once a week. 

I appreciate that means carrying a small amount of food on a walk with you. If your dog loves to retrieve or play tug, you could carry a ball or a tug toy instead.

Personally I no longer try to fade out rewards completely for my dogs. Outdoors I reinforce them with retrieves just as I always have and I am generous in rewarding recalls with either a short retrieve or some food. 

Indoors I have a pot of treats in my fridge, treat bags to hand and usually have a few pieces of kibble in my pockets. I use these to reward my dogs when they come in from the garden, sit in their bed while we eat, or any other time I see them doing something I approve of.  It’s a habit that has grown on me and I enjoy the pleasure it gives them to be rewarded for being polite. 

Try not to be in a hurry to lose the training treats. The bottom line, as my husband observes from time to time, is that there’s no flavor in nothing!  

Let me know what you think in the comments below!