This is the puppy training podcast episode number nine, how and when to reward my puppy.

This podcast is for those looking to train their own dog, whether as a companion,

therapy, or service dog. I'm here to help you every step of the way. This is the puppy training

podcast, and I'm your host, Amy Jensen.

Hi, you guys. I hope you had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. I'm coming to you a day late,

but I am here as promised and I'm excited to deliver this podcast to you guys today.

I actually struggled a little bit this week on figuring out what to talk about, but today it hit me and I knew exactly what

needed to be discussed. So we're going to talk today about how and when to reward your puppy.

A lot of times we get into the mode of, you know, we're training a brand new puppy and they have

cues and behaviors that they're learning. And so we do it

correctly. We, you know, we shape them and lower them into position. We mark yes when they do it and we

reward them. And we do this repeatedly. And that's awesome because we need this puppy to learn a word

and associate it with a behavior. And when the puppy does the behavior we reward them

and then that behavior gets repeated. They also learn that vocabulary word and now we have a common

language where we can ask our puppy to do something and they're able to do it. So this is all great

and wonderful until people forget to change the reinforcement schedule.

And what I mean by that is to change up when and what and how you deliver that reward to your

puppy. This is important because what happens is if we're always rewarding every single little

behavior that our puppy is doing, it gets to the point where they

start to kind of push us around and they get demanding. For example, if you ask your puppy to sit

and he knows that every time he sits, he's going to get a treat, then if you don't deliver

that treat fast enough, he's going to start barking or maybe he jumps on you or, or maybe he starts muzzle punching you, or whatever it is, that pushy, demanding behavior.

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