A week or two ago, I made a comment on social media that I do not use food lures or toy lures

in my dog training. And that created a lot of conversation, some hurt feelings. And I did say,

listen, I will address the reasons why in a podcast. Well, I thought at best that I explain how I train first,

which I have been doing over the last couple of weeks, which has led up to today's podcast

all about why I choose not to use food luring in my training. Hi, I'm Susan Garrett. Welcome to Shape by Dog.

I am going to preface today's podcast by saying, I was taught to food lure way back in the 80s.

The books I read back in the early 80s all about

dog training. I was training other people's dogs back then. They were all about lure and correct.

The first school I went to taught lure and correct. I started teaching for that school.

I learned how to lure and correct so well. I ended up having Jack Russell Terriers that got

perfect scores and obedience. My border collie was one of the top obedience, agility, and flyball

dog in all of North America. So, I learned to do it and learn to do it exceptionally well.

So, why change, Susan? Before I get to that, I'm going to state what I saw back then as some of

the advantages to using luring in your training. First of all, it's simple. It's super simple for somebody

who's an educator of people how to teach them how to train the dog with a lure. Just stick the

cookie on the nose and get

the dog to move into positions. I don't have to explain it to you. You probably have lured

a dog at some point in your life. So, it's easy for the educators to teach the people how to get

their dogs to do something, right? Sit down, stand, come, spin, whatever it is that you want to do.

Number two, you're in with a vast majority. I would say of all the people who use positive

reinforcement using food, I would say probably it's 95, 98, maybe more percent of them

use food lures as part of their training, at least to initiate training.

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