Food Reward V's Positive Reinforcement

[Guest Tess32]

I use Positive reinforcement, my dogs respond so well to praise. I figure that in emergency situation like when your dog is chasing a cat across the road etc you may not have food available when you need to recall it? I suppose it depends on what stimulates your dog everyone is different, its what eva works for you

I've yet to meet a dog who refuses to perform a known behaviour just cos food isn't there - most trainers use a variable reinforcement schedule anyway.

Like you say...whatever works for the dog is what you use.

Nat

[NorthernStarPits]

:cool: I started out with food reward then switched to positive reinforcement at about 5months old ( not me the dogs ) using whistle not clicker, now there all on hand signals..

[sidoney]

As Pete pointed out, there is a confusion of terminology here. Anything you give the dog, that it likes, in order to increase the likelihood of a behaviour happening again, is positive reinforcement. Praise and petting are two forms of positive reinforcement. Others are food, play, car rides (if the dog likes them), sex (yes it's been done), and so on.

If you have a dog trained with positive reinforcement, you can switch what you use. Use higher value rewards at first, while training. My adult dogs like food best, so I usually use food in order to train a behaviour, or to get a high performance out of them in distracting circumstances. They also like praise, and they like petting, and they like games, and they like car rides, and so on - so I use all of these at different times.

As far as reinforcing goes, I never would call a dog and then ignore it; I always positively reinforce it, and often that reinforcement is praise or petting. Training my puppy to come, I always use a high value reward, for her at the moment while we build our relationship it's food or play, sometimes petting and/or praise in a low distraction environment. As she becomes reliable in a behaviour I don't have to use a high value reinforcement every time. My older dogs may get only praise - but if they come from a high level distraction, they get a high value reward.

As was stated, you can go onto a variable schedule, and this is useful for training, in order to improve performance, however with my dogs, which are very soft natured and easily "squashed", I find it's good to praise pretty well any effort but give the high value reward for the most desired effort - so variable desirability of positive reinforcers keeps confidence and motivation high while at the same time distinguishing between the more desired and less desired behaviours. Keeping up confidence and desire to keep trying is good if you want the high performance.

Edited January 26, 2005 by sidoney