The problem with high value rewards
Training not working? Dog not motivated? Or even turning their nose up at treats?
We all know the solution, right?
That's it, that’s the knob we can turn to optimize our training. Crank it up to 11. Just get tastier treats! Peanut butter! Liver paste! Those little dried fish! Dried meat! Wet food in a tube! Only the stinkiest, stickiest treats! (There’s equivalent ramping up value options for other reward types, like using ever more exciting toys)
All of that can be great. I'm a proponent of paying dogs well for their efforts, no matter the type of reward used. Recalls in particular should always pay well. Same for behaviours that require a lot of effort, including learning something new. High value rewards absolutely have a valid time and place.
However, they can also get us into trouble.
High value reward pitfalls:
• Too many calories, especially for small dogs. ‘nuff said. Of course, you can reduce their regular diet a little to offset that, but most treats are not nutritionally complete so there’s a limit to this. Notable exception: Mushing up a nutritionally complete wet food and putting it in a tube. See Easy peasy wetfood squeezy.
• Creating conflict between the treat and the behaviour, resulting in the dog quickly grabbing the reward and retreating. Imagine I put your favourite food inside a ring of fire, or I put a suitcase of money in a room full of snakes, if you had an intense phobia of snakes. Maybe you’ll jump in and grab it. But are you going to feel good about this situation? Probably not. This is the same reason we don’t let people sell their organs for cash- a wealthy person could exploit others. A high value treat can motivate a dog to do things which they are not ready for and which you should not be asking of them just yet. In short, high value treats can let you get away with stuff you shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
• Luring into danger. If you keep luring your dog into situations that they soon regret, they’re gonna catch on. Things like luring them up onto a table and they end up getting a vaccine shot, or luring them close and then grabbing their collar in a way that startles them, or luring them up onto agility equipment and they end up getting a fright, etc. The dog will start getting suspicious of rewards.
• High value rewards can make the dog super excited, which might not suit your training goals- for instance if you’re wanting to reward calm behaviours in a calm manner. Let your dog define what is high value before you run to the store to get liver paste. For some dogs, kibble is wonderful, and you might even need to explore lower value treats (slices of carrot or cucumber, for instance). Tip: How the treat is delivered, and what marker you use also affects excitement level.
• Imagine this, you offer a “normal” value treat, but the dog isn’t motivated. Okay, so you offer them a higher value treat. That can train them to ignore treats that are not “up to par”. Sometimes that’s fine, of course we should adapt our reward to motivate the dog, but if that pattern keeps repeating, it can send you on a journey of ever increasing treat value, and being unable to use the dog’s normal diet as a treat.
• High value rewards can trigger resource guarding. A dog who resource guards might sniff the extra yummy treats you have, and then guard either a delivered treat, or even guard the opportunity to work for those treats. It can appear like the dog is guarding you (for instance from another dog in the household) but they may actually be guarding the training session within which they hope to earn access to those treats. Also, if you accidentally drop a treat and go to pick it up, that may be a bite risk situation if your dog resource guards.
• Dogs that have not yet learned that treats in your pocket are best earned by working for them can get frustrated and regress to jumping up, barking at you, mouthing at your pocket, etc., because of the irresistibly smelly treats stored there which they have no idea how to “earn” in an appropriate way. Better to start with just “so-so” treats so they can learn the concept first.
• A high value treat will not work if something else is fundamentally going wrong with your training. Because it’s not the only dial to adjust- there’s a lot of other options to play with. The control panel actually looks more like this:
If you find that you keep having to up the value of rewards, chances are, something is wrong with one of the other dials. This is not a complete list and not all of these will apply. This is to illustrate that there’s a few other dials and levers.
In this case, it looks like the person needs to increase the distance to the trigger to make it less intense, decrease the distractions, not push the food on the dog, consider changing the environment, change the rate of reinforcement and schedule, and use management to prevent the dog from rehearsing the undesired behaviours when they’re not working on training.
So when is it good to use high value rewards?
• For behaviours that are asking a lot of our dogs- learning new things, recalling from distractions, anything that has a high “cost” to your dog, they deserve to be compensated well for. Typically, the emergency recall and emergency leave-it/drop-it always qualify for a high value reward.
• For counter conditioning to scary things, while being mindful not to fall into the “creating conflict” pitfall from the above list.
• As a jackpot for an especially good effort.
• And… pretty much anytime you want to, as long as you’re not falling into a pitfall. We all want to spoil our dogs sometimes.