I have talked again and again about rewards and motivation. I can’t say it often enough; if you don’t have motivation, no learning will take place. I am a huge fan of food rewards but there are dogs who will work for things other than food. A smart trainer can figure out what their dog wants most in a certain situation and use that as the dogs reward.

A couple of weeks ago I met up with a new client to work with their rescued Doberman mix. The dog played really rough and we were working on getting her to come away from play when called to calm her energy level down a bit. We met up outside on a very cold Sat. They hadn’t fed her that morning so she was really hungry. I had liverwurst, cheese, ham and bologna on hand. We were working on teaching her to “check in” with her owners. We would reward her with a treat every time she turned towards her owners or looked at them. It is my theory that’s it’s almost impossible to get dogs to come to you if they don’t even know that you exist so we start with the basics: rewarding attention.

What we discovered with this dog was that her inclination to sniff overrode her desire to eat. Unless we starved her (and we wouldn’t) we weren’t going to get much out of her in an outdoor environment. We needed to find a reward that made sense to her in this situation. While we struggled with trying to get some behaviors out of her, I was thinking about David Premack and the Premack principle.

The Premack Principle was developed by David Premack, a psychologist. His theory states that more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors. The Premack Principle is also know as Grandma’s Law because in lay terms it supports what most grandmothers have known for years: making dessert contingent on eating the less desirable vegetables first, works (unless the kid doesn’t like dessert).

Try to build in Premack into your training, use play with other dogs to reward loose leash walking. Use sitting calmly at the door to reward rushing into the yard to chase squirrels. Use whatever your dog desires most (as long as it’s safe) and figure out how you can get your dog to work for it.