My 8 week old puppy is coming in two days! I know that a valuable currency for dogs is cooked chicken or turkey as training treats/rewards. Should I be giving them to my puppy as soon as she arrives, or wait for her tummy to adjust to her food and stops being anxious etc? Basically, will chicken affect her tummy if I start giving it to her straight away?
I've just started with kibble for treats because that has been a high enough currency! Seriously she goes bonkers for it. After three days I've just started to use small amounts of cheese if I want to up the reward, and I've used them for one training session and then waited to see how she reacted.
I used kibble for a while, I can't remember how long exactly but until the novelty wore off, maybe a couple of months. We measured out his food for the day, then divided it up for meals and training treats. Our rule to begin with was no human food but as treats needed to become higher in value as he became more bold and confident with his surroundings chicken, cheese and peanut butter were introduced.
I think it depends. I've introduced loads of treats really early with Luna, but her tummy is rock solid, and she's not that interested in her kibble. Willow and Shadow were far more delicate, so things had to be introduced slowly, and each new thing would lead to explosions until they got used to it. Luna has had: Cheese (mild Cheddar works better than mature, because it doesn't break up as much) Turkey frankfurter Roast pork (I bought a whole shoulder especially for the dogs!) Roast turkey Raw mince Fish4Dogs sea jerky treats Homemade tuna biscuits Fish4Dogs mackerel treats Probably more I can't remember... And she's not 12 weeks yet!
We used kibble at first from Bailey's weighed meals, but once he lost interest in those we started with little bits of meat (usually chicken as my OH eats a lot of it - I don't eat meat), frankfurter sausages, cheese (mild), turkey, raw carrot sticks, frozen chicken wings (great when teething as they seemed to sooth his poor little gums). He still loves all of these so I have to grit my teeth and cook meat A LOT more than I ever used to
Archie has a pretty solid gut as well (as evidenced by his newfound love of eating clumps of dirt he digs up from under the snow), so we didn't have to be too careful with his training treats tummy wise. We did discover that he may have a dairy allergy so we have cut cheese out. We used bits of sausage and organic training treats that were very tiny when he was wee. As he got older, he loved bits of carrots too.
It's when my OH opens the fridge and says "that looks good, when are we having it?" that I know I'm spoiling Libby more than him!
We just used her dry food/kibble to start with as its a big adjustment for them and well i her mind food is food (though now some food has more value than others but first few weeks normal dry food was a treat to her as well). I think we started treats after a week or two and the small liver bits are always for training - started when they gave use bits to use at puppy pre school and when we got to obedience training I found it at the shop.
