What are the best training treats for dogs?

For many years the standard training treat has been beef liver. Now, we love beef liver, but these days there are some great alternatives that may even result in greater training success.

To decide on the best treat for your dog we’d recommend you review the specific product images and/or videos on this site, but ahead of that consider the following:

• How big is the dog?
• Can they swallow treats whole?
• Do you want to use straight from the packet?
• Are you happy to buy long treats and slice off as needed?

Our Meat Stick Range are soft long treats, such as the ROO STICKS .  To use them as a training treat, you just slice thin discs off as needed and keep the rest of the stick in the pantry which ensures that it stays soft. Click here for more on Meat Sticks like CHICKEN STICKS.

Our 100% meat Beef Jerky is more of a robust treat, suiting medium and larger dogs best for an easy chew, but given it is quite thin even small dogs can work away at it.  If you want to use it as a training treat, you can cut slivers of it with secateurs.

If you are a traditionalist, our Beef Liver is a VERY flavour-some treat great for all size dogs. It is also extremely nutrient dense and is vital in many dog raw diets.  That means its the perfect supplement to ANY dogs diet. Click here for more on Beef Liver.

One thing you can be confident about is that our treats are all meat based Single ingredient are 100% animal based, but even composite treats are near 50% minimum meat, very low in salt, with little or no preservatives .  We always provide detailed ingredient lists for composite treats.

To chew or not to chew? That IS the question!

Some trainers believe the perfect treat needs to be small and quickly eaten, with minimum chomps, but others believe anywhere between 2 and 5 chews is ideal.

From a dog cognition point of view, there is a known process where most breeds of dogs take a couple of seconds after they have been praised and begin eating a treat, to make the connection between the recall, praise and treat.

Eating a treat in one gulp will often miss this important time delay and can even have a dog grab, run and swallow without hesitating to stay in front of you and get the full effect of the reward.  That might mean that the ‘reward effect’ of this positive reinforcement is diluted.  It could be a lost opportunity. Yes, the dog got the reward, but he or she might think they got away with something, rather than being rewarded for doing a good thing!