The Importance of Snacks in Your Dog’s Life

Snacks play an important role in your dog’s life. They can reward your dog for work well done and are very useful for training purposes.

Historically dogs bonded to man for the bones and foodstuffs we cast off. Man learned to domesticate these animals by offering them food. Dogs are pack family animals and they like to participate in everything we do. Being vehicles of unconditional love, dogs strive for our love and affection. The use of snacks and treats is sharing and bonding.

Giving your dog snacks is a good reward system to be used in training and playing with your pet. Tiny snacks like Train Me! Chicken, Bacon or Liver are very useful in rewarding your pet for certain activities where you want to give immediate gratification.If you watch dog shows on TV you can see the dog handlers giving their pets snacks as rewards for their behavior. Then there are the kinds of snacks that give long lasting entertainment and reward. These include rawhide chews in beef, bbq beef, cheese, chicken, ham, liver and peanut butter flavors. Remember the rawhide chews need to be used under close supervision. Keep an eye on your dog while he is chewing on it. Rawhide can function as snacks and toys because of the longevity of use. A Buster Behavior Cube can dispense snacks as your pet plays with it. This ball can be adjusted for difficulty in getting the treats out. This enables your dog to learn how to manipulate the toy and entertains and rewards your pet.

Dogs are intelligent and like to learn, be challenged, and to be REWARDED! While training you can give a snack every time they are successful and gradually they will learn to do the trick without the reward as their behavior is learned and becomes habit.

Snacks are very useful when training puppies. They are so eager and new and want to be in everything. Rewarding at this time helps set lifetime habits. Older dogs tend to get bad breath if they haven’t had tooth cleaning through the years. To counter act this, you can treat them with flavorful mint scented chips like Mighty Mini Mint or Fresh Bites Minty Fresh. Charcoal snacks used to be very popular but I have noticed a decline of availability on the market. Even when dogs have the periodontal disease they can still be very active and enjoy chewing treats and toys. A good product for bad breath is Chew N Fresh. This contains chlorophyll, eucalyptus oil, and spearmint. These are edible breath bones. You might want to freshen up their breath before close 1 to 1 playing.

A big part of our daily routine is spent on sharing snacks. We have 4 dogs (2 are 16 and 2 are 15) and they love snacks after their morning and evening meals. They also like a snack at our meal- time, so I have a variety of doggy treats ready for such times. These snacks are very small to prevent weight gain, just a taste to help them feel included.

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Category: Pets