In a few weeks, we will be releasing the beginning of a groom training course designed to help owners reduce their pet’s fear of the groom shop. It will not take more than one or two lessons before you realize groom training your dog is going to take a lot of treats.
There’s good reason to feed your dog a lot of treats during the groom training process. The goal of groom training is to reduce your pet’s fear of being handled, experiencing new sensations, and new places. Pairing these situations with a tasty treat is often the fastest way to convince your pet these things are desirable.
The good news is, you can lavish your dog in treats and still keep their waistline slim and trim. Here’s how:
Keep Treats Small
Your dog wants a treat, but in a blessed turn of events, they actually don’t notice if a treat is big or little. While the size of the treat you give escapes them, they actually can count and do notice how many treats you’re giving out.
This means that a hot dog slice is one treat, and the exact same sized hotdog slice cut into nine pieces, are one treat, and nine treats respectively. Your dog would rather have the nine treats then the one, even though they’re getting the same amount of food.
Treats should never be so big your dog has to chew to swallow it, so if training is ever paused because your dog is chomping down a treat, make it smaller.
Keep it to 10%
With one exception, you should limit treats to about 10% of your dog’s diet. The reason treats have to be limited isn’t just about your dog’s weight, it’s also about making sure they get enough nutrition from their complete and balanced diet.
If treats exceed 10%, your pet may not get enough vitamins and minerals from their food. To put it in perspective, a 5 pound chihuahua eats about half a cup of dog food a day, so 10% would be just under a tablespoon of treats.
If you feel you need more treats than this, I recommend using Ziwi Peak for your training treats. Although Ziwi Peak is, in my opinion, outrageously expensive as a food, as a training treat it’s more reasonable.
A pound of ziwi peak is as little as $30. This gives you thousands of training treats, and you can use as many as you like for training because they are complete and balanced.
These treats are so universally liked that I used to use them (with permission) when I was a dog groomer, and out of the thousands of dogs I groomed, only one or two did not like them. With these treats, you can safely feed up to their full caloric value in treats without robbing them of any nutrition.
Reduce Meal Portions
The last trick is to make sure that how ever many treats you are offering during training, that’s how many you should remove from the dinner bowl. If you are feeding a tablespoon of treats, you should take a tablespoon of dog food out of their feed, to balance calories.
If you are using a complete and balanced treat and you give them significantly more, say a quarter of a cup of treats, then that quarter cup needs to be taken out of their meals.
By reducing meal sizes to compensate for treats, you can avoid weight gain in your pet while still receiving all the benefits positive reinforcement has to offer.
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That’s such a smart approach! It’s great to see a course focused on making groom training a positive experience for both the dog and the owner.