This is just a quick short post on phasing out food from training your puppy, which can be done in various ways but one thing not to do is stop the reward dead and not rewarding again.
Ideally, you need to phase out the food gently to make sure that your puppy learns the behaviour you’re after while also learning that a reward may not always be food and could be cuddles, praise or a toy.
So there are various ways of training behaviour and also phasing the food out as a reward. You have fixed ratios, duration, reinforcement and more and the list goes on.
Dogs that are continually rewarded for a behaviour are continuous reinforcement and training this way may be ok at the beginning but after a while, your dog expects a treat reward all the time and then phasing out the food can become tricky as the dog has got used to seeing a piece of food in the owner’s hand.
Basically, if there is no reward visible, the dog can become less interested in doing what you ask of it.
A good way of phasing out the food is using a variable ratio reinforcement schedule so a dog doesn’t realise when a reward is coming and continues offering the desired behaviour more often without a food reward.
You could phase out the food by going one every two desired behaviours, then after a while one every three desired behaviours and so on. But with the variable ratio reinforcement being used this could be rewarding a dog after the third desired behaviour, and then after the eighth and then the tenth and then the fiftieth and so on, and the dog hasn’t got a clue of a pattern.
Or, you can say to yourself I am going to reward x amount of times over the following 10,20,30 desired behaviours.
It is a perfect way of training and worth a try. One thing to remember is not to use continuous reinforcement and then stop as it will not help your dog in the slightest.