Now, for the novice dog owner, 'treat' is basically the same thing, which would be any sort of reward that a dog seems to enjoy (dog biscuits, dog bones, human food are just a few). However, some dog trainers feel that classifying treats on different levels and rewarding those treats based on the degree of difficulty of a function/trick/skill that a dog has accomplished.
Since you're reading with intense anticipation, we're going to let you in on these levels just because we're that darn thoughtful of our human companions. The three levels of treats that we receive from our owners are gold treats, silver treats, and bronze treats. Examples of bronze treats would be pieces of dry dog food (seriously, some dogs cannot tell the difference between what they eat for meals and what they get for treats), carrot sticks, Milk-Bone biscuits, or any hard dog biscuit that you buy at a store or make at home (check out the internet for many easy, cheap, and quick to make/bake dog treat recipes that are more than likely a lot healthier than mass-produced dog treats you find at major retailers). Examples of silver treats would be meatier/smellier treats such as 'Snausages' or something along the lines of that, peanut butter treats (store bought or homemade), or pieces of cheese (they can be slices or small cubes). Examples of gold medal treats would be pieces of cut up hot dog, pieces of cut up chicken breast (small cubes), or small pieces of sliced steak (our FAVORITE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Dogs are natural carnivores, so when you bring out smelly animal flesh, we're probably going to do whatever is necessary to obtain that piece of meat.
How you reward these level of treats is subjective to your individual training situation. For a new pup, any sort of acquired training (potty outside, sit, down, etc) deserves a gold treat at the beginning stages of the dog's life. However, as the dog develops into an adult and needs more advanced challenges (stay, fetch, etc), you can then start to work with the different levels of treats. When we were young pups, we received all sorts of treat levels for potty breaks and for sitting down. Once we got a bit older, we strictly got bronze treats for those actions and our owners focused on more advanced training (stay, down, leave it) for the silver and gold treats. Once those were mastered, our owners moved on to the most difficult challenges (tricks or training in front of distractions (other people, other animals, other dogs (we didn't group 'dogs' with animals because we believe that we're somewhere in the middle of the two....not techincally people, but definitely not just an 'animal' of some sort)).
Keep in mind that the more distractions around the dog, the tougher it will be to train the dog. This holds true even if you have gold treats for the dog. When Rocky was a pup, our owners could have been holding a raw piece of New York Strip in their hands and he would not have cared if there were distractions around him (squirrels, open/unfenced areas, etc). When you're just starting to train and/or are moving onto more difficult training routines that the dog has not mastered, please be sure to try to limit the distractions by training in your own home, then in your own backyard, and then finally in more public areas such as parks.
If your dog is very smart and very good at easily/quickly picking up any and all training and tricks, you may want to consider moving onto stuff like agility training or water sports (retrieving, etc). We canines love a good challenge and there is nothing that can get us in trouble faster than not being challenged (ex: staying at home all day bored and unexercised while our owner is at work/out at a restaurant, etc).
We hope these training tips and treat classifications help you out! As always, if you have questions or comments, please leave them in the comments section and we'll address them. In the meantime, happy training!!!
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