A training treat has three jobs: to be worth working for, to be eaten in a second, and not to wreck your dog’s waistline. Most commercial treats fail at least one of these.
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The three criteria
1. Small. Pea-sized for a Labrador. Smaller for a terrier. You want twenty to fifty rewards in a session, and if each one is a biscuit you have fed a meal.
2. Soft. Crunchy treats take time to chew, which breaks the rhythm of a session and delays the next repetition. Soft treats are swallowed in a second.
3. Smelly. Value, to a dog, correlates strongly with aroma.
Most commercial “training treats” are hard, dry biscuits. They are convenient and they are low value.
The reward ladder
Match the reward to the difficulty. Using your best currency for everything wastes it.
Low value — known behaviours in easy environments
- Kibble from the day’s ration
- Plain dry biscuits
Medium value — new behaviours at home, known behaviours outdoors
- Soft commercial training treats
- Small cheese cubes
- Cooked chicken
High value — hard environments, recall, counter-conditioning, anything frightening
- Roast chicken or turkey
- Sausage or hot dog, in tiny pieces
- Liver, cooked or freeze-dried
- Sardines
- Squeezy cheese or pâté from a tube
- Cat food, which is often more aromatic than dog food
A note on counter-conditioning: if you are changing a dog’s emotional response to something frightening, use the top of the ladder. Kibble does not compete with fear.
Working out the calories
Treats and extras of all kinds should stay under ten percent of daily calories.
For a 10kg dog eating around 500 kcal a day, that is 50 kcal — which is roughly:
- 15g of cheese, or
- 25g of cooked chicken breast, or
- Two small commercial treats
That is not much, which is why the most common mistake in dog training is not the method but the accounting.
The solution trainers use: measure the day’s food into a pot each morning and use part of it for training. Kibble for easy repetitions, high-value food for hard ones, with the high-value portion subtracted from the meal.
Home-made options
Cooked chicken breast, cut into small cubes. The default.
Liver, boiled then baked low until dry and tacky. Cheap, extremely high value, and it keeps in the fridge for a week.
Sardines in spring water, mashed. Messy, and extremely effective.
Cheese — high value, high calorie, high salt. Use sparingly and in tiny pieces.
Hot dogs, microwaved into small dry discs so they are less greasy. Very processed and very effective; treat it as a top-of-the-ladder option, not an everyday one.
Freeze-dried single-ingredient meat — the most convenient high-value commercial option.
Commercial treats: what to look for
- A short ingredient list
- A named meat as the first ingredient
- Soft texture
- Small pieces, or easy to break into small pieces
- A printed kcal figure, which is the number you actually need
- No xylitol, and no added sugar
Avoid: large biscuits, anything dyed bright colours, treats with long ingredient lists dominated by cereals, and rawhide as a training reward.
Dental chews are not training treats
They are a different thing with a different purpose, and they carry substantial calories — 70 to 100 kcal for a mid-size one, which is a quarter of a small dog’s daily allowance.
Greenies Teenie Dental Dog Treats
A dental chew with evidence behind the texture. Give one as a daily dental measure, not as a training reward, and subtract the calories from the day’s food.
Getting medication into a dog
Related problem, same principle — and the standard trick is a soft treat with a cavity.
Greenies Pill Pockets
Soft treats with a hollow centre for hiding tablets. The technique that makes them work: give one empty first, then the loaded one, then another empty one. A dog who expects an empty one swallows the middle one without inspecting it.
Storage and hygiene
Food you carry in a pouch all day is food that spoils. Fresh chicken and cheese should be made up daily and refrigerated between sessions.
Wash the pouch regularly; a treat pouch that has held liver for a fortnight is a genuinely unpleasant object.
IRIS USA Airtight Pet Food Storage Container
For the kibble you are using as low-value rewards — airtight storage keeps it palatable, and stale oxidised kibble is markedly less motivating than fresh.
Beyond food
Food is the most practical reward for most training, but it is not the only one, and for some dogs it is not the best.
Toys and tug — extremely high value for many working breeds, and useful because the reward can be delivered at a distance.
Access to something the dog wants — permission to sniff, to greet a friend, to go through a door, to be let off the lead. These are called life rewards and they are powerful precisely because they are what the dog was already after.
Praise and touch — real but generally lower value than people assume. They work best as a supplement rather than as the main reward for difficult work.
The test is simple: does the behaviour get stronger? If it does, the reward was worth it. If it does not, your dog has told you what they think of the pay.
