Dog Treat production: Go get Meat!

I think I will forever be thought of as the "Liver Lady" and Wags' Training Facility will be known (at least to the dogs) as the Place where the Best Cookies in Town can be found. 
So, what's the Secret? What do I put into my training bag and what are the Magic Training treats?

I thought I would share in photos How some of the Amazing Treats are made that many students ask about and marvel over. 

First off - I make almost all of my training "cookies" at home, myself. And while I call them cookies, they are actually not cookies at all but more or less all MEAT. And that's pretty well it - if there is a "Secret" - you just heard it, so you could stop right here :-) Go get Meat! 
I feed my dogs a RAW diet and hand in hand with that seems to have developed a deep desire to really know  the ingredients in their food and treats - and so I've found that this just makes overall sense, as well as being Delicious and very High in value for the dogs.

Whenever possible I get my hands on organ meats and buy those to turn into cookies. Liver (in moderation), heart, kidney and tongue are fantastic and often found at very reasonable prices. Most dogs go absolutely nuts over any and all of these!

In the absence of organ meats - I look for sales in the meat department and have often found that you can get large beef roasts for as little as $8-$10. That's about the same price that you would pay for a bag of commercially prepared treats - which are often full of all kinds of ingredients that you'd never want to put into your own body :-( (so why feed that to our dogs?)
So here we go: here are illustrated steps for becoming a Cookie Factory :-)

This is Heart. By the time I thought of documenting the treat-making process , these pieces had already been through  stage 1: boiling on the stove in water.
And just to be clear - I do the same with a steak, with liver, kidney, tongue...boil first.

After the meat has boiled, I find it easiest to just take a pair of scissors and go to town: cut the  meat  straight onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Here we go now -- a cookie sheet loaded with boiled meat: all cut up and ready to go into the oven to be dried up a bit more. You COULD stop at this stage and just use the treats like this...but they are quite wet and not particularly nice to put into pockets, so that's the reason for continuing to the Oven stage :-)

Here the treats are: after the oven. See the difference? Now they are almost like Jerky, and most people have no issue with sticking these in their pockets.

More of the dried Jerky-type heart cookies. From here I use scissors to cut them even smaller. Green pea-size or just smaller is a good  size reference when you think of how big your Training treats should be.

So there we have it - turning a piece of Fresh meat into Amazing Dogs-Will-Love-Them "Cookies"! Really very easy! 

But WAIT - DON'T STOP THERE: Use the water you boiled the meat in!! This is amazing broth that I use for making Frozen Kongs.

While I just told you I feed my dogs RAW - I do usually have some high quality kibble around. I switch my own dogs to kibble for camping and travel, when having access to a fridge or freezer is very hard, so I do occasionally feed them kibble - and when I make treats (as above) I DO love utilizing that lovely broth that is left in the pot after boiling meat.

What happens while the broth is warm, is that when you pour kibble directly into it - the kibble just soaks up all the broth and completely falls apart - becoming almost a puree...which - when frozen, is a Very cool challenge for the dogs to extract!!!

After boiling your meat; pour kibble right into the broth that is in the pot and let sit  for a few hours.  The  kibble soaks up all the liquid. I've added some oats, a few pieces of the Real meat and other things of "goodness" here as well.

Now - get your Kongs and other stuffable food toys out and ready!

To the left are veggie and fruit mash/mix that normally would be mixed into my dogs' regular meals. This time I decided to add some of it to the kibble-mix that was going into the Kongs.

And VOILA! A collection of food-stuffed Kongs and Busy Buddy-toys ready for the freezer :-) Yes, from here I take this whole pile of Kongs - throw them into a grocery bag to keep the freezer clean and just toss the whole plastic bag in the deep freezer. Then, the next time you want to give your dog "something to do" for a while - pull out a frozen meal: serve frozen! A fantastic thing to have on hand for days when you simply want to keep your dog occupied. 

Easy peasy?! 
Perhaps it goes without saying, but obviously if you haven't taught your dog to eat his meals from food-toys - you need to start with that first BEFORE you start freezing them! If your dog isn't already hooked on the idea of eating his regular food from a food toy like these - it will likely just be very frustrating to him if his food is now also frozen. So - in that case - start with the unfrozen version and just GRADUALLY make the challenge of getting the food out a bit harder! 

Once they are hooked on the idea, though - WOW - is this ever a fun way to serve a meal and a great, great way to keep your dog happily chewing for quite an extended time - as well as send your dog back into his natural roots and origin as a Master Scavenger and Extractor extraordinaire!!

Have FUN with your Treat Factory!!

"This puppy can't do it!" or do we need to find better motivation?

Last night in Puppy Foundation Skills class we worked on a variety of Attention games and Focus. There were five pups in the group and for most of them it was week two or three in a very distracting environment! Quite often we'll have this conversation about the need to find something (usually food or toy) that Puppy really likes that we can use to reinforce (reward) the behaviors we like and are working on. Without something that the puppy truly cares about, the "training" can easily become an exercise in frustration and can understandably seem like a battle that can't be won. It can totally seem like "This puppy can't or won't do it!" I've often heard people sigh in frustration and say "My puppy is just too distracted!"

If that seems to be the case - (usually) there is nothing wrong with the puppy. There is just an imbalance between what the owner is using as a "reward" and a very stimulating environment that seems very enticing and inviting (puppy mates to potentially get to play with?!!!) Unless we really take care too look for something that the puppy TRULY values - why would a baby animal automatically "know" what is wanted or asked of him and choose to turn to a person with "mediocre" rewards?

Quite often we have this idea that any food should do - any puppy should work for any kind of cookie or any kind of toy in any kind of environment. After all - we gave the puppy SOMETHING, right? Shouldn't that be enough?

Something pretty cool happened last night that illustrates just how big a difference the choice of reinforcement (reward) can make.

I had been keeping an eye on one of our newest members of the class, observing and hearing from the handler how distracted her puppy was; unable to focus. I was sensing some frustration growing. I asked if I could borrow the puppy for a moment to demonstrate the next exercise (a baby heeling/ attentive leash walking exercise).

After quickly establishing that the puppy was comfortable being with me, I held the leash handle in my hand and simply waited for the puppy to acknowledge me. After a short moment, the puppy offered a quick head turn in my direction...I praised her up and said "YES!" and smiling warmly at the puppy I pulled out some string cheese to reward this voluntary check-in. She ate her cheese slowly as if wondering about it - and went out to the end of the leash to strain toward another puppy and see if she would get to go play. I didn't let her get to the puppy but stood still again waiting for her to check back with me...waited a little longer this time...and eventually she looked back in my direction. I again told her "YES!" and offered another piece of string cheese. Same lukewarm reaction from her. She ate the cheese but not with the kind of gusto that comes from true enjoyment. A few more repetitions of the same....each time it seemed to take a little longer before she checked back with me and between each repeptition there seemed to be more straining away and more sniffing of the floor. I was now looking for plan B as I was running out of cheese and thinking "This is not really working".

After the on-leash version (described in text) is well established,
it is not such a big step to remove the leash and continue to
work the puppy off-leash. By giving the rewards right next to your body
you start to convince the puppy that this is indeed a "magical
place" and they start to show up beside your leg more and
more and more...

So I re-loaded my pocket with some freeze dried liver instead. My demo-Puppy could immediately smell the difference and what a shift in attitude we got to witness! All of a sudden I had a puppy looking up to me, offering gorgeous attention, and when praised and told "YES!" she was snarfing up her liver with GUSTO!  and very quickly re-orienting to me yet again and again... as if continually asking "Is this what you want? This? What about this? And this too?"
We started exactly the same as before. I stood still, just waiting for her to look in my direction. When she did, I told her "YES!" smiling and offering her a piece of liver or two. It only took seconds before she simply would not look away, she would not leave my side! She just stood there beside me looking into my face and eyes. That is the first step. When that was established, I would start to move. One or two steps. Was puppy following? YES! she was! So again I would verbally praise her up, tell her YES! and pull out a piece of liver and reward right next to my pant leg (in the location I want the dog to walk for nice polite walking-beside). It was a beautiful sight and this puppy had in a matter of minutes transformed from "too distracted to focus" to a focus-machine...looking for ways to earn more reinforcement!

There was no magic to this - the importance lies in Understanding what happened and how it impacts your dog's ability to learn and focus and be motivated to work. What we use as "rewards" are only reinforcing to the dog if the DOG sees them as true rewards and WANTS them! Sometimes we simply have to experiment and try different things! Like with my demo puppy. We learned something about what she truly finds valuable yesterday.

People who really get hooked on dogs sports have usually
also been very successful at developing a nice repertoire of
"top rewards". Big effort = Big reward. Everyone is happy,
and the dog loves the continual challenges presented.

In this puppy's case the difference between "too distracted and not interested in training" and a "learning machine" involved a switch from something we "think" should be a reward: cheese (which is something many dogs looove - but this puppy felt lukewarm about) or the dry dog bisquits the owner had been trying to use (which clearly were not of high enough value) to something we let her tell us she WANTS: dried liver.

It's really no different than motivating people when you think about it. One of my mentors and teachers, Chris Bach (The Third Way) illustrated this to me with a very memorable example. Let's say you have a job where there are big performance bonuses paid out in event tickets. You are a hockey fan and really don;t care for the Opera at all, but your boss at work insisted on paying your performance bonus in tickets to go see the Opera. How "rewarding" would you find that? How long would you continue to work in that kind of situation? Would it seem like it's worth your while?

But if your boss now had a conversation with you about your wants and desires and you could tell him you'd really prefer tickets to hockey games instead - and he started to give you wonderful tickets to your favorite hockey teams' games...now, wouldn't that change things? All of a sudden you would feel like you were heard and had great motivation to work!

So, for our dogs - whom we do not have the ability to converse with like that...we need to find out in different ways. It's worth doing some experimentation with and can be a discovery as simple as what we had in class. Or it might take some time and effort to really find out.
Sometimes the top reinforcers will change, too. So keep experimenting and try different things! Also switch things up. The more highly-sought-after rewards you know you have in the repertoire to use, the easier the journey will be! What are your dog's favorite "tickets"? What is going to help motivate him so that he goes from "Too distracted to work" or "mediocre response" to that "WITH GUSTO and brilliance!" response?!