I have a highly food motivated terrier in agility. I am working with a fancy pants trainer who is insisting that I need to get him used to a toy reward to up the play value of the agility experience. She is convinced my dog is going places and I need to get him faster and digging in more on course to shave 10ths of seconds of my time. So, I am new at this and this is my first real agility dog and I started him with food treats as that is what he really gets into. If I attempt to reward him with a toy and a puppy party he is disappointed and keeps looking for the food. Even a crumb.
He is not a super high play dog with me, never has been. He will play a little with me but it’s more chasing games. He will play some fetch but he’d rather chase the toy, grab it, celebrate with it, and then run off alone to destroy it. I can get him to fetch a couple of times if I trade the retrieved toy for food but even with that game it’s 3 or 4 reps and then he goes to ground to destroy the toy.
He will trade anything for food. He has zero resource guarding tendencies.
He is highly trainable, he’s really easy to work with. I figure I can train him to do anything I want so…is it possible to train a dog to love playing with toys?
Yes I have done the “special toy” game–a special toy used only for reward, with the whole ceremony and excitement and yeah that’s cool for about 5 seconds, then bored, and zero transfer of this even 5 second excitement post-course. It’s just not rewarding to him. Just not. He will even totally ignore a thrown toy post course and go–where’s my food? No matter how much I run around and whoop and scamper and delight in the toy he just looks at me like I’m nuts and boring.
His reward seems to be running the actual course–chasing me, me chasing him, doing contacts, and me being woo woo excited at the end. Oh, and the food back at the crate.
I’m inclined to think this is square peg/round hole situation but fancy pants trainer is insistent that I need to work on it and get him toy motivated. I’m doing my best to be a good student. Any thoughts/suggestions?
Oh ps. he will tug pretty good at home but NEVER in public. He is a fairly low confidence dog that I have worked diligently since he was a tiny puppy to boost.