Gold, Silver and Bronze Treats - The Best Treats for Training your Pup

Gold, Silver and Bronze Level Treats - Variety is the spice of life!

When starting off training, whether with a puppy or just a new dog to your home, you’re going to use a lot of treats. Treats are a wonderful way to create a positive relationship with you and your dog and are a great way to reinforce good behaviours and to help redirect bad behaviours.

Something we often see clients do is to overuse a treat until it starts to lose value. The dog likes the treat at the beginning, so the client buys the same bag over and over again. As the dog becomes habituated to the treats, they lose value, and the dog begins to choose distractions over the treats as the novelty wears off.

One of my best tricks as a dog trainer is to bring new, exciting, high value treats the dog hasn't seen before to my training sessions. Clients are always impressed with how responsive the dog is to my treats just cause they’re new. This helps highlight to the clients the advantage of changing up your treats - it makes the training easier.

As we start working with treats and our dogs we soon realize not all treats have the same value. Some are higher value and some are less exciting to the dogs. There are treats your dog will do anything for, and treats they’re quick to tune out. So we’ve found it helpful to kinda put the treats into ‘value categories’ - gold, silver and bronze. 

Gold level would be the treats your dog will do almost anything for. We wanna use these treats for higher challenge skills like recall at the park and redirecting off of birds or squirrels. In addition we want to keep the value of these treats high by using them less frequently and only when dealing with high level distractions. These treats are great for creating new behaviors.

Some of our gold level treats would include :Wild Vibes Kangaroo or Rawbone Sausages

Silver level are treats your dog likes on a consistent basis. We tend to use these treats when your dog is distracted but the distraction is something interesting but not completely overwhelming. Great for mid level distractions that your dog is not that excited about.

Some of our silver level treats would include: Crumps Mini Trainers or Granville Island Sardines

Bronze level treats are treats your dog likes in low distraction environments. We use these treats to maintain behaviours and tend to use them on quieter, lower distraction parts of the walk. While clients often use ‘kibble’ for this purpose I recommend stepping it up a bit by grabbing a bag of lower processed, higher meat, dehydrated or freeze dried foods. For a small amount more you’ll get a much better response from the dog while keeping the novelty high.

Some of our bronze level treats would include: Iti Air Dried Food or Zeal Air Dried Food

Please give us an email, call or stop by the store to see what some of these treats look like and talk to our staff about the best tools we have to help you train your dog!