How to get rid of lures, even if your dog only listens with treats!

Today we’re going to discuss getting out of the rut where your dog only listens with treats. This is a progress killer, and your training with those behaviors will come to a halt because now it’s a hostage negotiation. You feel like you have to bribe your dog to get what you need.

The best way to solve this problem is to avoid it altogether. Lures are just a training tool to jumpstart a behavior. We tell our students that the most important step in Lure Reward Training is to get the food out of their hands. Usually, you can do this almost immediately with most behaviors, but if you’ve already dug yourself into a hole, here’s how we deal with that.

THE BAIT+SWITCH

I teach my students a strategy called the “Bait and Switch,” and it goes like this:

1. You will have two food rewards, one in each hand. One hand will be for luring, while the other will be for rewarding. Keep the reward hand behind your back.
2. We’ll demo this with Down because Down is a really common one that people get hung up with. Lure the behavior like normal.
3. As soon as the behavior happens, mark it, and then swap hands lightning fast. Use the food handling technique we taught you before.

The key to this technique is repetition. As you start to work like this, your dog will focus less on the luring hand and more on the reward hand. Once you start to notice this shift in your dog’s attention, it’s time to remove the lure altogether.

Now, Signal With an Empty Hand

Repeat the process above, but without food in your luring hand. The food reward will still come in from your other hand.

This is an important phase in the learning process for your dog; they need to understand that they don’t have to see food to get rewarded.

You’re creating that dependency if you guarantee or promise food before anything happens. However, if you can teach your dog that their behavior makes awesome things appear, you’ve created a completely different paradigm.

Remember: rewards are fine, bribes are not.

When you’re using lures in the early stages to help jumpstart behaviors, it’s easy to fall into the trap of using that lure too long, and then it becomes a bribe.

Also, for this to be successful, you need to be petty quick on the draw. Consequently, this will help you develop your speed and timing while you work. You’ll have to mark the behavior the millisecond you get what you want and quickly pop the reward in there.

Try Some Reward Scaling, Too

Another fun add-on to the Bait+Switch technique is to scale up the rewards when your dog performs without the food lure. This is an example of differential reinforcement for excellent behavior (DRE). It builds off of my concept of Reward Scaling, which is a great way to build faster, more precise behaviors and a super working attitude from your dog.

Remember: repetition is the pivot point for this. Most people generally fall short in their training because they just don’t do the requisite reps. If you’re stuck in this dead-end, you’ll have to do the reps to turn it around. Fortunately, if you’re diligent, you can usually bounce back in a day or so. You just gotta drum on it!

NOW GO PRACTICE!

All right guys, I hope this was helpful. Let me know how it goes in the comments! As always: keep learning, keep practicing, and I’ll see you next time. Thanks for watching!

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