Training & Behavior

I counted them out of pure suspicion one Sunday, because the bag was going down faster than seemed possible for a dog who only does a handful of tricks, and the number made me put the bag down and do the maths properly. Forty-two treats that week, at roughly eight calories each, came to over three hundred calories, and his whole daily ration is six hundred. I'd been handing him more than half his food as snacks and calling it training.

It's easy to miss because a treat is small in your hand and small in your head. You give one for sitting, one for the door, one for the look he does that makes you laugh, and none of them feel like a meal until you line them up and add them up. Dogs are brilliant at manufacturing opportunities to be rewarded, and mine had quietly turned every minor compliance into a vending session.

The fix wasn't to stop treating, because rewards are how he learns, but to treat with intent. I switched to a lower-calorie option, the plain dried liver cut into pea-sized bits rather than the cheese-flavoured pellets the size of a thumbnail, and I started counting the day's treats into a small pot each morning so the bag stayed in the cupboard. What left the pot was accounted for. What stayed in the bag wasn't dinner in disguise.

I also started using his actual kibble as the default reward for boring behaviours. Sit at the door, here's a piece of his own food. The exciting stuff, the real meat, is reserved for the hard things, the recall in the park, the settle on a busy pavement, the moments that deserve a jackpot rather than a routine. Spreading the good treats thin made them mean more, which is the opposite of what I expected.

The weight came off slowly once the treat math was honest, because the treats had been the hidden half of his diet, the part neither of us was tracking. He didn't seem to notice the downgrade, because a dog doesn't know the calorie count of the thing in his mouth, he only knows he got paid. Paying in kibble for easy work and meat for hard work kept him just as motivated and made me just as relevant.

The lesson outlasted the diet. Treating is a conversation, not a reflex, and a reflex is what had been happening, me reaching for the bag without thinking because he was cute and I was distracted. Now the pot sits on the counter as a small reminder that rewards are food, and food is a budget, and a budget with no accounting is how a healthy dog gets quietly fat while everyone thinks they're being kind.

There's a weird social pressure around treats I didn't expect. People hand your dog something at the park and you're the rude one if you decline, even when you're the one who'll deal with the weight gain and the waistline vet visit. I started saying he's on a plan, plain and unapologetic, and most people respect it once you stop performing gratitude for a snack he doesn't need, because his health is my job, not the neighbour's kindness.

I also moved the treats out of my own pockets entirely and kept them in the measuring pot, because treats in a coat pocket are invisible calories that somehow don't count in your head until the bag's empty. Out of sight, out of the unplanned handful. The pot forced honesty, and honesty is what the diet was missing, not willpower, because I had plenty of willpower for the big meals and none for the hundred tiny ones that added up to half his food.

He's lean now and the tricks still work, because a dog doesn't know the reward got smaller, he only knows it showed up. The training treats were never really about feeding him, they were about paying attention to what I was actually handing over, and that attention is the part that transferred to every other corner of how I feed him, which is a bigger win than the lost grams on the scale suggested it would be.

The pot still sits on the counter, half full most mornings, topped up from the cupboard only when it's actually empty, and that small visible limit is what keeps the whole thing honest. He doesn't know the pot exists, he only knows the treat arrives when he's earned it, and the distance between those two facts is the part I had to learn, slowly, the way most of the good dog advice turns out to be advice about the owner.

The pot, the count, the honesty, none of it was really about the treats in the end, and all of it was about me paying attention to what I was actually doing.