Small Dog Treat Solutions!

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I had a recent conversation about options to motivate and successfully train a very small dog. This little dog was not responding to training as expected, which told me that she may need something different for food rewards (her person is using food/treats to train…  other options may include toys or access to life’s rewards! But that’s for another blog post)
The challenges of training a small dog using food reinforcement (rewards) include: overfeeding causing an upset stomach or loosing the dog’s attention due to feeling full, and possibly an unbalanced diet or excess leading to being overweight. With those challenges in mind, here are some suggestions…

  • Use your dog’s regular everyday diet to train. For some dogs this will not be effective (hint… if you lose your dog’s attention this could be an indication that your food is not rewarding enough and you need to switch), you may not be able to use their regular diet at all, or only in some environments (such as at home in the kitchen, etc)
  • Try using liquid-soft fresh foods: canned (pate) style dog food, plain yogurt, cream cheese, some human baby foods may also be safe … or anything similar to these options. These foods are often high value.
  • Offer these extra soft foods as a single lick! Use a container that you can place a portion of lickable food in: offer a single lick of tasty food for each successful training repetition. This option could be refrigerated and used many times over a few days.
  • Single lick and refill: use a plastic or metal (caution with metal and excessive chewers!) spoon, rounded wooden popsicle stick, etc
  • Prep a small food safe squeeze tube with a wet/soft food concoction that can be squeezed out into small portions. Options could include a squeezable baby food pouch, camping food squeeze tube (which come in plastic and silicone options), or something like a squeezable reusable cleaned out ketchup or mustard bottle. This is another multi-use refrigerable option.

Many thanks to our friend Char for the adorable photo on this post.

Malli Hutchings is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer located on the Southern End of Vancouver Island, BC, Canada.