How to Use Real Life Rewards Instead of Treats

Start using real life rewards now, and use them alongside food rather than instead of it. Everything your dog wants is a paycheck you already have in your pocket. Going out the door, getting off leash, permission to sniff a fence post, the ball leaving your hand, getting up on the couch, greeting a person. If you hand those things out for free, you are spending your best currency on nothing.

The honest limit is this. Real life rewards are excellent for maintaining and generalizing behaviors your dog already knows. They are poor for teaching new ones. Food is faster and clearer for teaching, and anyone who tells you that you can build a new behavior from scratch on nothing but life rewards is describing a much slower road than the one available.

What actually counts as a real life reward

• Permission to sniff. The single most useful one on a walk, and it is free and infinite.
• Forward movement. For a dog who wants to get somewhere, the walk continuing is the payment.
• Doors. Front door, car door, crate door, back gate. Every one is a reward gate.
• Release to play. The ball, the tug, another dog, the water.
• Access. Onto the couch, into the kitchen, off the leash in a safe field.
• Attention. Being talked to and touched, for the dog who wants that more than food.

The one sentence version of the rule

Ask for something small, then give him the thing he was already going to get. That is it. He wants out the door, so he sits first. He wants to sniff that hydrant, so he checks in with you first. He wants the ball thrown, so he holds a down for three seconds first.

The thing that makes this work rather than just annoying your dog is that the ask has to be small and the reward has to be immediate. Sit, then door opens. Not sit, down, stay, wait, spin, then door opens. Long rituals in front of every good thing turn the good things into a chore and the dog starts dreading them.

Where they work best, which is the walk

The walk is the natural home for this because the dog wants two things constantly, forward motion and smells, and you control both.

1. Walk until the leash tightens. Stop. Do not yank, do not talk, just stop moving.
2. Wait for slack. He turns, he backs up, the leash loosens. That is the behavior.
3. Say the word and go. Pick a release like let's go, and the walk continues. Moving forward is the payment.
4. Add a sniff release. When he is walking nicely for twenty or thirty steps, say go sniff and let him have thirty seconds at whatever he wants. Loose leash bought him the sniff.
5. Run this for the whole walk. Not a five minute drill. The whole thing, every walk, for two weeks.

A dog on this system usually stops testing the end of the leash inside ten days, because pulling now reliably ends the walk's forward motion and slack reliably restarts it. That is a cleaner cause and effect than any correction I could give him.

Where food still wins

• Teaching anything new. First fifty reps of a new behavior, use food. It is faster and the dog is less frustrated.
• Anywhere hard. New environments, near triggers, in a vet office. Food gives you a way to pay at a rate that matches the difficulty.
• Counter conditioning. If you are changing how a dog feels about something rather than what he does, food is doing chemical work that permission cannot do.
• Anything with a safety consequence. Emergency recall stays on the best food you own, forever. Do not get clever with that one.

A first week you can actually run

Pick three gates and use them every single time for seven days. Most people do best with the front door, the food bowl, and the leash going on.

1. Front door. Sit, wait two seconds, door opens, release word, out. If he breaks, the door closes and you reset. Usually three or four resets on day one and near zero by day four.
2. Food bowl. Sit, bowl goes down, release word, eat. Do not stretch this to thirty seconds. Two seconds is fine and the point is the pattern, not the endurance.
3. Leash on. Sit still, clip goes on. If he spins, the leash goes back on the hook for ten seconds.

Three gates, done consistently, will change how your dog moves through the house within a week. Twelve gates done inconsistently will change nothing.

What it looks like when it is working

The obvious sign is that your dog starts offering. He sits at the door without being asked. He glances at you before he takes off toward a smell. That check in is the behavior you actually wanted all along, and it shows up on its own once permission becomes predictable.

If nothing changes after two weeks, the usual cause is that the rewards are still leaking. Someone in the house is opening the door with the dog barging through it, or the walk continues while he is pulling half the time. Life rewards only work if the gate is actually closed. One person handing them out for free undoes the other three.

The walk is where this pays off fastest, and loose leash walking is the skill that makes every other outdoor behavior easier. My free loose leash blueprint has the full two week progression with the stopping drill and the sniff releases built in. Download the Loose Leash blueprint and start on your next walk.

Ready to train your dog?

Every drill in this article comes from the WorldWide K9 Academy course library. If you want the full step by step system, start with the $5 intro course.