FF110: Pay to Play: Using Food to Get Great Toy Play

The Take AKA Bite the Thing!

While most dogs understand to offer behaviors like a nose touch or paw target to objects, many need to learn that they can interact with objects with their mouth. This is the first step for teaching any sort of toy play: teaching our dog to bite the thing! 

This first step can be very difficult to get and is very much tied to enthusiasm, so try to remember these points as you are working with your dog:

• Movement increases enthusiasm! Use tossed treats as a reward and reset between reps to keep your dog moving. 
• Reinforce effort! If your dog is trying, they should be getting reinforced. Use bigger payouts for more effort and jackpots for biting the object. 
• Keep sessions short and fun! I generally work this for no more than 60 seconds and schedule sessions when my dog is the most excited. 

The Object

Because we are teaching our dog to interact with an object with their mouth, we want to use as neutral of an object as possible. Typically, toys should be avoided since there is usually a history behind their use. Some dogs may have learned to ignore toy movement from prior attempts to initiate play and other dogs like toys too much and struggle realizing what is causing the mark or even may refuse to take food at all. 

Typically, starting with a ¾” or smaller wooden dowel, wooden cooking spoon, kids plastic spoon, chop stick (for tiny dogs!) or similar items work well. If your dog struggles to interact with objects, then starting with a favorite chew like a bully stick is a good strategy to get the behavior. Using a chew does result in an additional training step of generalizing to non-edible objects. 

Strategies

In all of my training, I like to start with the path that will get me to my end goal the fastest, the method that requires fewer additional steps such as fading extra movement or changing objects. These strategies are listed in the order in which I would attempt first and then move onto the next if I’m not seeing success.  

Before starting with our object, it is important that our dog understands one crucial concept: move away from the treat hand in order to get the food. We can teach this by using a simple behavior: hand touch. This specific loop involving the hand touch should be taught to all dogs regardless if they have a hand touch or not because we can use it in our first strategy listed below, the Presented Take.  

With a few treats in one hand and your dog sitting in front of you, present your other hand within reach of your dog. Mark when they sniff your hand and reward from the hand pre-loaded with treats. The goal should be that they touch your presented hand with their nose and then move back to the treat hand to get their reward.  

Presented Take

Just like in the previous video, we’ll want to have one hand pre-loaded with treats and the other hand will present the object. I’ve had best luck with putting my clicker in my treat hand or simply using a verbal marker for this loop.

With your dog in front of you, present the object for them to bite. Mark and reward ANY interaction with it, having them move to your treat hand to get the reward just like in the Hand Touch Loop shown in the video prior. 

As your dog becomes familiar with this loop, start to wait for two nose touches to the object or biting the object before marking. Any open mouth interactions should get a bigger reinforcer (longer in duration is best!) and any nose touches should get just a single reward. Don’t forget to add verbal praise and petting if your dog enjoys those interactions! As biting the object is offered more frequently, begin to shift that to a single reward and stop rewarding nose touches altogether.

If your dog struggles, you can add a treat toss in between reps to encourage movement:

1. Treat toss reset
2. Present object
3. Mark and reward interaction with object
4. Start at 1 again

Moving Take

This strategy is executed the same as the Presented Take with one difference, instead of presented the object within reach of your dog. You slowly move it away from them so that they have to try to “catch” it for the nose touch. Often this extra movement will add just enough frustration that our dogs will try to use their mouth to stop that movement. It is VERY important with this method that you reinforce effort and help keep your dog successful since we are using frustration, this can easily cause our dogs to stop trying altogether. 

Pick Up

This is the end goal of the behavior, we can present our dog with an object and they bite it. Ultimately, we will be working all of the strategies to this goal before moving on in our Fetch training plan. 

Sometimes our dogs are more willing to interact with an object if we are not holding it and you can shape the pickup without working on the take strategies listed previously. 

Place the object on the ground, mark and reward any interaction with it. As before, use a scaling reinforcement schedule to add extra reinforcement: single reward for nose touches, longer duration reward for mouth interaction. 

To teach your dog to pickup the object if you taught the take from your hand initially, start with the take for a few reps and then lower the object to the ground while still holding it. Mark and reward any effort to interact with it and gradually shape that to a take like before. 

Once your dog is comfortable picking up the object from the ground, add in the treat toss reset to introduce the loop we’ll be using in future sessions to teach fetch.

1. Treat toss reset
2. Set object on dog’s path
3. Mark pick up
4. Reward from your hand or near you
5. Start at 1 again

Fight Food with Food

Any of the strategies can be tried using a chew like a bully stick as an object for dogs that are really struggling to open their mouth. I like to start with the presented take and move down in the strategies as mentioned before.