This is what they call the ‘nitty gritty’ of dog training treats.
In its most basic form, less crumbs can mean a more attentive dog. But there is much more to your best training treats than that.
Once you have your training routine down, much of it will continue to rely on great dog training treats. The ones that are NATURAL and built for purpose. We look at your best options here:
Dog treats can have many dimensions; palatability, overall size and convenience.
But I would add two more to this mix that are just as important if not more important,
NUTRITION and minimal crumbling.
It’s a little-known fact that a dog training treat doesn’t need to be artificial to be highly prized by a dog. Most dog food is so low in meat content, that providing a dog training treat that is higher than 40% meat will outdo more commercial dog food.
And if you are looking for something that will be highly prized, it’s a SMELL and an animal product (both meat and offal) that they rarely get.
The importance of minimal crumbling in a dog training treat is so that you don’t end up with a packet full of crumbs you can’t give your dog, and more importantly, stays intact until inside their mouth and as they crunch it down, doesn’t instantly flake into a hundred crumbs that they will then want to chase along the ground.
This is obviously because a training session, and instruction retention of training goes a lot smoother and faster when the focus isn’t taken off the training command and put on seeking every crumb that didn’t make it into the dog’s stomach.
The components that impact dog training treat integrity
Ingredients
This should be essentially the number one concern. If you feed commercial dog food then your dog is used to mostly getting 40% meat at most. If you feed raw (with grains model) your dog is probably getting about the same, just a nicer presentation for humans.
The only class of dog owner who will know this secret automatically are the true raw feeders. Those who mostly used animal products (meat, offal and bones) in their dog’s diet. And for these people they will understand why natural single ingredient animal products are best for their dog’s growth and nutrition, but they might struggle to get animals that they don’t regularly include into their dogs daily diet as food.
Ingredient wise if you use a cut down version of a true meat jerky. That jerky will have striations along the muscle. It will be a whole product that doesn’t easily crumble (unless over cooked).
A lot of people use offal for dog training, because while some offal like liver is usually boiled into a slurry and dried in sheets meaning it doesn’t have its original organ integrity characteristics, it is still usually fairly solid.
Yes, you can break it in your fingers, but it often doesn’t crumble as much as non-animal-based treats. Things like heart and kidney and lung are often just slices of those whole organs, so they maintain integrity and don’t necessarily crumble (though yes lung cubes often can depend on the cut or drying technique).
CONCLUSION
All of the above is basically explaining why, from even a crumbling aspect, that whole single ingredient animal treats are often the best to use in dog training. Particularly compared with vegetable or grain matter treats.
Plant based treats sometimes have the consistency of dog food kibble, that is made purposely to be very soft and very easy to eat, and over eat. And so it often crumbles.
The only reason it won’t crumble is often the other additives that are added to glue the grains together. And if you don’t like additives and colouring for your children, you should understand that your dogs can have exactly the same kind of allergy reactions.
Natural animal-based treats, that don’t crumble, that are rare to your dog, should always be your first choice in training!
