When should you reward your dog? This article will answer some of your questions on when and how to reward your dog with purpose for more effective and faster training results.

Reward training uses the principle of Positive Reinforcement. Positive Reinforcement is when we give the dog something he or she wants as a consequence for behavior we like. It's like going to work and getting paid.

No voluntary behavior is ever maintained or increased without reinforcement.

Therefore, any behavior you want maintained or increased should be reinforced. That's not to say you should give a food reward every time you see behavior you want more of. There are many potential reinforcers, food is just one of them. Patting, letting your dog outside, going for a walk, attention, praise, toys and games are all potentially reinforcers. The real and only test of a reinforcer is to see if you get more of the behavior you rewarded.

Reinforcers should be given immediately. Sometimes this means you have to use a word or sound (such as a 'clicker' in Clicker Training) to mark the behavior, then follow up with the reward immediately.

Not all good behavior should always be rewarded. At first, every instance of good behavior should be rewarded. As our dog gets really good at performing the good behavior, we can start to reward less often. However, be aware that the behavior will go away if the rewards go away completely.

In new or more challenging situations we should be sure to reward good behavior. Just because our dog will 'sit' every time he is asked at home, doesn't mean he knows how to do it at the park with a whole lot more distractions than he is used to. It is not disobedience, it is almost a completely new behavior! And new good behaviors need to be rewarded.

Some behaviors are really hard for our dogs to do or understand. We need to start off by making those behaviors really easy. When our dog gets good at the easy version, we can start making it just a little harder. Then we stop rewarding the easy version and reward only the slightly harder version. We can keep making the behavior harder and harder this way until we get the behavior we really wanted all along.

For more information on Positive Reinforcement, click here.