About Our Training

I wanted to provide you with a bit of information on the type of training we offer at the Truro Vet Hospital, it is often referred to as “positive reinforcement training,” reward-based training is exactly what it sounds like. It involves teaching your dog to offer the behaviors you like by rewarding those behaviors with things your dog likes. It can also desensitize your dog to scary things by forming associations with good things to make them less scary. Reward-based training is an incredibly effective way to train dogs and modify their behavior and is supported by well-established scientific principles and many years of real-life training with dogs and other species. 

All training offered at the Truro Vet Hospital is reward based.

Dogs find many things rewarding:

• Food
• Social time with people and other animals
• Games and play
• Toys
• Instinctual behaviors (digging, chasing, barking, etc.)
• Freedom and choice

Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.

Benefits of reward-based training

• Effective and fun
• Increases communication between you and your dog
• Builds trust between you and your dog
• Considers the emotional state of the dog and the effect of emotions on behavior
• Can be successfully used to address behavior problems and to teach manners, tricks, agility and more

Drawbacks of reward-based training

There really aren’t any. It’s a myth that training with food and toys is a “bribe” and your dog won’t be able to listen and obey without food or toys present. This method of training rewards dogs frequently when behaviors are new, then slowly weans them off the need for immediate reinforcement as they become proficient at behaviors. Think of it like a kindergartner who needs a sticker for every assignment, but then moves through school and eventually graduates into the working world and receives a periodic paycheck.