How to Use Rewards During Dog Training by Richard Cross Terris

Without rewards, training a dog is an almost impossible task. If they are used in the right way, training any dog becomes a whole lot easier. However many dog owners don't really know how to use dog treats to the greatest effect, which often results in them becoming useless. When this happens dog training once again becomes a daunting task.
Always make sure that when you are giving a treat for good behaviour that you give it straight after the behaviour has taken place. The dog will associate the reward with its last action, as until it is trained it doesn't know what was right and what was wrong. If you give the dog the treat for something that happened earlier you might be accidentally reinforcing bad behaviour.
When you first start to train a dog you should give rewards every time it follows a command. As your dog begins to understand what you want, then you can start to try it without the rewards, but not before. It is often a good idea to replace food rewards with something else the dog likes, for example a game or petting. Even when your dog is performing the commands without needing a treat you can still reward the good behaviour once the command has been carried out.
Most importantly you should never praise or reward you dog unless it has done something well. This might sound obvious, but it is often tempting to reward a dog for nothing because we love it so much. This only weakens the use of rewards as a training tool
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