Need something to take with me on walks to lure him away from other dogs etc, so needs to be very very rewarding, but at the same time I don't want to be lugging around and diving my hand into a bag of anything too horrible if possible!
Sorry, most of the really good stuff smells awful! The only non-smelly high value treat I've found for Ella is cheese
Sorry, my go-to is boiled liver which is indeed very smelly. But not slimy, so maybe you could manage? Slightly less yummy (but also less odor-ific) is grilled chicken. I always seemed to have one jeans pocket stuffed with chicken and the other stuffed with paper towels to wipe of the grease. Ick.
With my older adopted dog Casper I used treattoobs, filling them up with lots of exciting fillings. He adores tuna and cream cheese. Treattoobs are my emergency standby though. They have a different "mark" as well, if I say "squeezy cheese!" to Casper he knows the treat toob is coming out. If I have to I will just hold the end to his nose and while squeezing, lure him away. Benson is a bit different, I made myself more interesting combined with higher value treats than normal. For him he loves sausage, the venison sausage from Billy and Margots are his favourite and very good quality. Now though, I have a small squeaky rabbit skin tuggy that fits neatly into any of my pockets, and use a game of tuggy as a distraction. I have this game on cue. If Benson won't respond to this, then he is way over his threshold and it is case of luring and or snapping on his lead pronto
For Stanley it's sausages and cheese. He'll do anything for those! I think he'd really like fishy things to.. but I'm too embarrassed to walk around with a fish odour following me
I've started introducing crispy chicken skin as my recall reward. Holy moly, you should see her belt towards me since I've started this. So....crispy chicken skin?
Hah you soon become immune to the smell. My mum always makes a comment when Xena's eating her mackerel Kong, but I can't even smell it anymore. I shudder to think what my house must really smell like, cos I bet the plug ins aren't fooling anybody
Sam would sell his soul for the fish4dogs little fishy biscuits , I end up like the Pied Piper with all the dogs following, in the hopes of a share out x
High value really does depend upon your dog's preferences - chicken, liver, hot dog sausage, cheese are all good. From a training viewpoint luring away from a dog is not a good practice particularly if the dog has ignored your recall as you are setting up a chain of behaviour which goes something like - see dog, go to greet, ignore recall(s) get a super tasty treat. It's best to clip the lead back on and walk the dog away if your recall has failed and put it down as a training issue to work on
This is more so for passing by dogs while on lead, to keep him engaged on me and not potentially lunging on the lead to greet the other dog, or, if we're on lead and other dogs are not on lead and are coming towards us, to again keep him engaged on me. So it needs to be very high reward for this as other dogs are very rewarding to him! So far in his training, he is only off lead in places where there are very few to no dogs, and if we do see dogs, I can recall him back to me to be put back on lead, or, we can wait for the other dogs to move on before progressing. He's not ready to be recalled away from other dogs yet and thankfully he has not had any chances to ignore a recall away from other dogs In busy places I always pop him on lead, but I am always wary of passing other dogs head-on on a narrow path or what have you, and would like to be armed with something extra tasty!
You need to test out what works for your dog. We are VERY lucky that Coco views those big, dry Bonio biscuits as very high value and not they're smelly at all. At the moment anyway. Pork sausage is also high value for him. I am using them to help us walk past dogs at the moment. Our toughest challenge. I remember using a baby food pouch stuffed with mushed sardine to help is in a busy village situation. Unknown to me, the end of the pouch had opened up and I had sardine goo all down the front of my coat. Boy did I smell bad. I bought some tubes after this episode.
I didn't even consider what people might think of a waft of fish smell trailing behind me, yes I'd be too embarrassed too now you mention it
I find squeezy tubes are great for this. I use tubes of liver paste or salmon paste from the pet shop. Tuna and cream cheese sounds good though! Maybe I should get more creative
Regarding squeezy tubes, this sort of thing? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Arden-Gran...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=FA8MVSQTD0YA1P9QDDAV
Here you go, this is a video of our dogs with the treat toob. It took Casper a little while to get used to them. https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=eY02UcTZLBk