The Recall Activity Guide: Food as a Controlled Distraction and a Reinforcer

Using food as a distraction can be a helpful way to teach your dog to move away (and towards you!) from the thing they actually want to move towards.

Welcome back to our Recall Guide series.

In the previous section, we talked in a bit more detail about reinforcers and reinforcement. Among other things, covered how often you should be reinforcing and how to get the most out of your reinforcers.

In this section, which happens to be a favorite of mine, we are going to talk about some fun ways to teach dogs to do the opposite of what they may currently want to do around a distraction — so instead of moving towards the distraction, they come to you!

Food as a Controlled Distraction and a Reinforcer

Your dog is going to encounter a million things that they are going to want to move towards in their life. Part of the challenge with recall is finding difficult distractions that we can control (so we can make sure our dogs have the skills to succeed). One of my favorite distractions to work with is food. It can double as the distraction and the reinforcer. We can teach them that it actually serves them to move away from it as an entry point to teaching them to move away from (and towards you!) other distractions.

The activities below will allow you to teach your dog a new reinforcement system around food (“take it” — or whatever you choose to call it), stimulus control around food, and to orient/move towards you when something awesome is out there in order to get access to the something awesome “out there.” So here are some activities that I find super useful in building a dog’s ability to move away from something they want when you ask them to (a lot of this is really teaching stimulus control). These are written as a progression, so for example, while there are a variety of options for teaching “take it,” I want to see a dog who can perform that skill before I ask them to walk with me away from the bowl.