If your dog refuses to work for treats, it’s pretty reasonable to assume they’re just not food motivated. But when we talk to our training clients or Academy members and start doing detective work, it becomes clear that the reason their dog isn’t working for food has nothing to do with how much they like food.
There are a lot of other factors that can disguise themselves as low food motivation.
But first of all: why does it matter if your dog won’t work for food?
Aren’t there other ways to train?
Sure, but here are four big reasons why the ability to work for food is worth taking the time to build:
1: Honestly, it’s because food is super convenient. Food is an incredibly easy way to teach new skills and behaviors quickly. It makes it easy to get a lot of repetitions in so you can make progress quickly.
2: Food-based training allows your dog to work for their dinner, which provides some much-needed mental stimulation and enrichment for your little pet scavenger-predator beast.
3: If a dog isn’t working for food, it’s usually a sign that something else is going on. A dog’s willingness or unwillingness to take food is a barometer of how well training is going, it can help you figure out if you’re ready to move to the next level or if you need to take a step back.
4: When used properly, training with food helps you build a bond. It creates good feelings about you, the trainer, and teaches Sparky that you are fun and the provider of good things.
Is it really low food motivation… or low frustration tolerance?
Dogs who eagerly work for treats seem really food motivated. And in many cases, sure, that’s true. But often, those dogs just have a really high tolerance for frustration. They’re patient/polite enough to put up with our training mistakes and sloppy communication.
That patience might be because they like food so much that the frustration is worth it, but it might also be because they love to interact with people, or they love to work.
Case in point:
My border collie, Merlin, was never crazy about food.
He was underweight when I adopted him. It took ages to put any meat on his bones because he just didn’t like to eat – except during training. He loved training so much that he’d happily spend hours working for food. Even when I made a mistake that might confuse another dog, he was like, “ha HA! A challenge. I love a challenge!”
What a nerd.
For him, some frustration seemed to be a good thing. He liked using his brain and playing the guessing game of “What The Hell Is Jake On About Now?”
And here’s an example of the exact opposite situation:
Flower is the epitome of a food-motivated dog. Food is her PASSION. Even boring stuff like kibble or dry dog biscuits. She loves it all. But she has low frustration tolerance. (Well – not as much anymore, but definitely when she was a pup)
During a training session, if she got one thing wrong, she would be done. Give up and walk away. On the surface, it looks like she doesn’t care about food. When in fact she loves food more than life itself.
The food motivation test
If your dog won’t work for treats, try this quick test. Ask yourself:
- Outside of training, does my dog eat their meals with any degree of enthusiasm?
- Do they ever beg for MY meal?
- If I give them a free piece of “human food” (chicken, cheese, deli meat, etc), do they wolf it down?
- Do they work for treats just fine at home, but lose interest in treats away from home?
If you answered yes to ANY of these questions, congrats! Your dog is food motivated.
Now it’s time to dig deeper and figure out what the real issue is.
Ten reasons dogs can seem unmotivated by food
1. You’re using dog treats
Getting the easy answer out of the way first. You may simply be using treats that are too boring for the task at hand.
Try this:
Ditch the cute little “training treats” from the pet shop. Get a package of whatever chicken is on sale at the grocery store, roast it in your oven, then chop it into little pieces. (Making sure to remove any bones, of course)
And voilà! You have a big pile of cost-effective, healthy, high-value dog treats.
We give this advice a lot, but not everyone follows it at first. Which I get – it probably feels too easy.
And I can also understand why some people might hesitate to do the chicken thing. You’re a brand new puppy owner, excited to buy puppy things, and those cute little bags of treats at the pet store are much more appealing than buying a boring package of raw meat at the supermarket.
But really, chicken is the secret weapon. Most dogs love it. It’s nutritious. It’s mild enough that it rarely causes stomach upsets. And since chicken is one of the most common pet food ingredients, there’s a good chance your dog is already eating chicken in their regular food, so their system is used to it.
2. The dog is anxious or stressed
This is an incredibly common one, but it’s easy to miss because it’s not always obvious. It doesn’t always present as the dog whining or cowering in the corner.
My first dog, Friday, loved food more than pretty much anything. She was obsessed with food – at home. But outside the house? Forget about it. I’d bring treats on a walk to work on loose leash walking or whatever, and she’d completely ignore me.
Knowing what I know now, the poor girl was clearly anxious. Hypervigilant out in the world, she wasn’t really able to just chill and exist. She didn’t have the skills to cope with the environment.
Bu I didn’t know it at the time. I thought she was just excitable, stubborn, independent, etc. Ya know, all those things that we call dogs who don’t fall over themselves to do what we say.
Stress/anxiety is common with newly-adopted dogs in particular.
If you brought your new dog home a week ago and you’re excited to teach them lots of things but they don’t seem to care, you might need to take it as a sign that they need more time to settle in first.
They’re right smack in the middle of the adjustment period, which is a tumultuous time. They don’t know where they are, everything is different. They may even be grieving their previous life. So snacking is low on their list of priorities.
3. There’s confusion or lack of clarity
Sparky doesn’t understand how to make you give them the treat.
This happens a lot when two factors are both in play:
1️⃣ You’re trying to get them to do something they have not already been taught.
2️⃣ The situation has not been set up as a proper training session with clear signaling that indicates “okay, we’re doing the training thing now. You now have the opportunity to earn rewards by making guesses.”
For example: Your puppy gets into a crazy mood and jumps all over the furniture. You want them to get off the furniture, so you hold out a treat and say “hey, get off the couch!”
But the puppy hasn’t already been taught the Off cue in calmer situations, so they just stare blankly.
4. They don’t understand how training works
When we think of “dog training” we usually think of the specific skills we want to teach. Like Sit, Roll Over, Please Refrain from Attacking the Neighbor’s Elderly Shih Tzu, etc.
But training itself is also a skill.
See, training is a bit of a guessing game. It requires the dog to understand that they should focus on you for a while, and offer behaviors (which is dog trainer speak for “making guesses”) to get reinforcement.
If they haven’t been taught how to play the guessing game, then when you hold out a treat and gesture at them, they just think you’re being a big meanie and refusing to give them their snack for no reason.
A dog with low frustration tolerance might then go “pffft fine, I guess I’ll go find something else to do.”
We don’t usually realize that training itself is something that needs to be taught, because lots of dogs are food-driven enough or frustration-tolerant enough to push through those obstacles and figure out how to make it work. This would be your typical border collie. Herding dogs who were bred to pay close attention to the shepherds every whim.
Dogs who are less likely to put up with this lack of clarity are the ones we typically call “stubborn.” Like huskies, malamutes, Rhodesian ridgebacks, Shiba inus, sighthounds, or certain livestock guardian breeds. Dogs who were bred to work a little more independent of humans and make their own decisions.
See also: Is there hope for your stubborn dog? Why some breeds are harder to train, and the secret to success
5. You’re leveling up too fast
You may be pushing a training exercise to a higher difficulty level before the dog is ready.
Like, maybe you did teach your puppy the Off cue in a calm setting. But you didn’t slowly level up to the point where they can do it when they’re in that crazy mood.
And if you’ve struggled with your leash-pulling dog, I’m willing to bet you’ve run into the issue where you’ve tried to use treats to reward them for walking next to you, but they don’t care about treats on walks.
And actually, I wouldn’t expect them to. The ways that loose leash training is traditionally taught just sets dog and human up to fail. It’s usually recommended you start training on an actual walk, probably right out your front door. Which is way too high of a difficulty level.
6. They’re afraid of getting it wrong
You often see this with dogs who are trained equally with rewards and punishments. If they know that there’s a chance they’ll be corrected for giving the wrong answer, even if they’re gonna get a delicious treat if they get it right, they may err on the side of caution and stop offering guesses all together.
If I were to tell you it’s pop quiz time and I’ll give you $5 for every dog training question that you answer correctly, you’d probably be happy to answer the questions even if you’re just guessing.
But what if I also say I’m going to charge you $5 for every question you get wrong? A lot fewer people would be willing to make guesses.
This was epitomized in Jonas, my “crossover” dog – meaning the dog with whom I switched from traditional correction-based training to reward-based methods. All of Jonas’ serious skills like sit, stay, lie down, etc were taught with traditional methods where he’d be corrected if he did the wrong thing.
But then we took an agility class, where the instructors made it clear that things were positive only. If the dog made a mistake, nothing’s gonna happen. We’re gonna ignore it and move on.
Jonas came to life in that class.
When he realized there were no consequences for wrong answers, he became much more engaged in training.
This might be the culprit with a rescue dog whose history you don’t know. There’s a possibility that their previous owner trained this way.
7. They’re not in the right headspace for training
You see this a lot with puppies. We wait until they’re in Hyper Attack Mode and then try to get them to focus on training, but they can’t.
Or when Sparky’s coming down from a stressful experience. You take your reactive dog to a park, and they have an explosive reaction to another dog walking by. You take them out of that situation so they’re no longer barking, but their body is still full of stress hormones and they can’t think.
Imagine if you got into a scary situation, like a fender bender. Your heart’s pounding and your hands are shaking from the adrenaline… and then I hand you a sheet of math problems. WTF. Are you going to be able to do the math problems or are you going to tell me to **** off?
There are also simple factors that we wouldn’t even really think about:
Does the dog need to pee? Are they sleep deprived and need a nap? Are you asking them to do a down-stay on wet grass, or a heel on hot pavement?
8. Food is being used in ways it isn’t intended to be
In situations where food wouldn’t help anyway, or in ways that don’t align with the rules of good dog training.
Like with a reactive dog who sees a trigger and goes nuts, barking and lunging. Sticking a treat in front of them at that point won’t help.
People often try to use counter-conditioning to help their dog overcome fear or aggression, but don’t have any luck. That’s because counter-conditioning has to be done in a very specific way, and it’s easy to mess up. See The Right Way to Use Desensitization and Counter-Conditioning to Help a Fearful or Aggressive Dog
A related problem:
9. Food has been “poisoned”
Dogs can start to dislike treats if they’re associated with something unpleasant.
Food can become poisoned if it is:
Used coercively. To lure a nervous dog closer to a scary stranger, onto the scale at the vet’s office, into the bathtub, etc.
Used to distract the dog from a distraction. Waving it in their face to force their focus back on you, etc.
Used regularly in situations the dog finds even moderately stressful. Let’s say I bring liver treats to obedience class with my anxious dog Sparky every week. Nothing bad ever happens there… but Sparky spends every class feeling a little nervous, feeling the pressure. He slowly starts to hate liver treats.
Used too much. If food is the only reinforcer you ever use, you’ll run into issues. How many times have we all rolled our eyes at the boss who keeps throwing pizza parties for their employees instead of giving them what they actually need: a raise?
To be effective, your reinforcer has to match the function of your dog’s behavior (and that’s a lesson for another day, kids!)
10. Undetected health issues
Allergies, dental disease, joint pain, kidney disease, gut health issues… there are lots of physical reasons a dog might be fussy about food.
If Sparky’s lack of interest in treats is new (or if you’ve just adopted this dog and don’t know if the lack of interest is new), I’d think about talking to your vet soon.
If their lack of interest is not new and you’re not seeing any other indicators of illness, you probably don’t have to go to a vet right away. But keep in mind that dogs are very good at masking symptoms and hiding pain, and some food intolerances can go undetected for years.
There are lots of cases where a notoriously picky eater eventually goes to the right vet who does the right test and BAM! Turns out they had [insert health problem here] for years.
So there ya go, some food for thought. Pun intended.
These are just a few of the things we quickly run through on our mental checklists when troubleshooting our students’ training issues. It’s why they pay us the not-so-big bucks.
