To treat or not to treat

Is it okay to use treats when training your dog with SkyShepherd? What if your dog is particularly motivated by treats, and really hyper and active otherwise? Doesn't your dog need the treats to do what you ask?

While treats can be a sure-fire way to get your dog's attention in the moment. Using them generally can lead to welded-hip syndrome when you're trying to train with SkyShepherd. You may notice your dog is paying so much attention to you and what you're doing with the treats that it isn't really understanding what you're trying to teach. 

We've noticed this phenomenon on dogs that we've helped testers train. Their high-energy dog would pay attention, but didn't really connect what was going on to the treats. This is a problem because it makes it hard to a) understand whether your dog is understanding the training and b) can cause issues later on when you're trying to do long-leash training to see if your dog wanders into the alert zones. In the one case, you may accidentally advance in training before your dog truly should, leading to wasted  time when you inevitably have to bring things back to the beginning. In the other case, with hip-weld, you can't advance in training because your dog never leaves your side, even when on a long leash.

Most dogs can be motivated by praise and affection from their owner. If you've got a particularly hyper dog or a puppy, whose focus is hard to get, you can train with SkyShepherd on the back side of a daily walk, run, or play-session. That prior energy expenditure should prime your dog to better focus on SkyShepherd training. Of course don't tire them out too much, or they might not want to do training at all.