Gentle!

Teaching Your Dog to Take Treats Gently

Make sure you don’t reward your dog for grabby/nippy behavior.  If s/he is going for the treat in a rude way and still receiving it, that only reinforces the behavior.  Instead, make the process of training your dog to take treats gently a separate command that you work on isolated from others.

Take a treat in your hand and close your fingers around it.  Offer it to your dog.  If s/he is very aggressive with nipping, you may want to consider wearing gloves. Keep your hand closed until the moment your dog stops biting and starts licking gently or moves away from your closed hand.  The moment s/he does, open your hand and allow him/her to take the treat while saying your command of choice (“easy” or “gentle”). 

Try and practice this command two to three times a day in sessions of 5-10 minutes each. 

Don’t try and enforce this  gentle rule while you’re working on other commands at the same time.  To avoid rewarding your dog’s grabby behavior while s/he’s still learning to be gentle, you can stuff a Kong with peanut butter or squeeze cheese and allow your dog a few licks of it to reward during training.  A dab of peanut butter on a spatula also works well for this purpose.  While you are teaching “gentle”, you can also toss the treats to the dog when  you are training other behaviors. 

Continue to say "Gentle" or "Easy" while working on this and your dog will begin to associate that word with the behavior of taking the treat gently. Then you can start to expect that gentle treat-taking whenever s/he earns one.  If s/he slips up and starts to get rough, say "Sorry!" and pull your hand away.  Then offer the treat again, reminding him to be "Gentle" or “Easy”.

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