Factors company ( i the southern border the dog risk receiving mix. The variety of this random selection builds interest our dogs because they never know what the next treat reward is going to be. Have you ever watched a dog eat a piece of steak? Unless the piece of meat is huge they take it their mouth and virtually swallow it. I find myself thinking, Hey dummy why didn't you chew that a little and make it last a little longer? The fact is dogs derive pleasure from the physical act of eating. Your dog would get more pleasure out of cutting the same hunk of steak into 30 pieces than if he ate the entire piece one swallow. The correct size of a food treat is the size of eraser on a pencil. We want our dog to eat a treat as quickly as possible we can move on with training. Small treats also allow for multiple treats being given one right after the other sustained training. This is where you feed one treat after another to extend duration exercise even though the treats you purchase be a good size when they come out of the bag you should break them up into smaller pieces. Perfect examples are the Zuke's treats or the yummy chummy treats. Some of the larger ones can be broke into about 10 smaller pieces. As I break mine up I always wonder how people 't do that and simply waste 90% of the value of these treats by feeding the entire Small treats allow trainers to JACKPOT their treats. This is where they occasionally reward the dog with a number of treats all at one time This can be a real motivator to the dog who really does something good. It's on the same principle as winning a jackpot on a slot machine. If you are familiar with marker training you know that placement of the food reward is important part of the learning process. By this I mean if you are training the dog to a hand touch the reward is always placed on the hand that your dog touched with his nose. When trainers have a lower drive dog, simply making the dog move to get a reward often increase motivation. Making it jump up a little increase drive. on these kinds of dogs 't just stick the food its mouth. Make him work for it. I would like to take a minute to talk about how timing of food rewards can affect performance. This not apply to pet owners but rather to people who intend to compete various dog sports. By timing I 't mean the concept of how to mark or click a behavior marker training within 1 seconds. Rather I want to pass on interesting concept that is seen on studies with training rats. If a rat is trained to run a maze and it is rewarded half way through the maze with a food reward and then that food reward with held the rat run the last half of the maze quicker than when it normally gets the reward half way through. how does this relate to your dog training? Well think about it. agility routine is 30 seconds a Schutzhund obedience routine is over 15 minutes and a Mondioring routine is 45 minutes If you compete dog sports can you wrap your mind around this concept and experiment with ways to improve your dog's performance. I can't do it for you. This has to come from the trainers and how they read their dog. Prey drive is the drive to chase and tug. Trainers can use a dog's prey drive as a reward training. Some dogs are born with a great deal of prey drive and some dogs have very little prey drive. Some dogs can have prey drive but as as they think there is food around the prey drive goes away. Morgi the Corgi is a perfect example of this. She has nice prey drive but she is also a chow hound. The second she thinks we have a food reward her prey drive goes away. our video podcast of this work we demonstrate with a puppy how quick movement with food the hand triggers the dogs prey drive. Keep mind that this work is not using food as a reward but rather to build drive. Putting wad of high value food treats a sock and teaching the dog to play tug with the food sock also goes a way towards teaching low prey drive dogs that have food drive to play