My cousin recently got a puppy and watched my video on Morning Routine for Puppies 8-16 weeks. After watching it, she asked me, “Do you feed them from your hand five times a day? That seems crazy!”
So I decided to write a longer response to share it with her and anyone else who is interested.
Hand feeding is pretty much what it sounds like: the process of removing a bowl from mealtimes and giving the dog food from your hand. The specifics are more about how much and when to do it.
It will be helpful for you to watch the Morning Routine for Puppies video before reading the rest of this blog. Keep in mind I made the video a few years ago, so there might be some changes as my training process is a continual evolution. But the video will give you an idea about what hand feeding looks like.
I use this method for many different reasons. First, it reduces the need for treats. By using hand feeding, I don’t need to increase my dog’s motivation by providing extra or fancier food than his normal ration. I just teach my puppy that in order to access his food, he needs to do some simple behaviors.
Puppies are already used to following their mother around and pestering her for milk. You will often see a litter of puppies chasing their mother around the yard, just hoping to access some milk. With hand feeding, the handler is basically taking the place of the mother, swapping out your dog’s motivation for milk for motivation for food. As your dog matures, it will need to eat more, and will be seeking out new ways to find food.
The very first thing I do is just have my dog move forward toward food. Since I’m holding the food, that results in the dog following me. I put my hand down and move it a few feet in front of the dog, and the dog goes to the food and eats it. Then I take a few more steps back, put my hand out again; the dog goes to the hand and eats the food.
This is just the beginning of the process of teaching the dog that he can access food in my hand by walking to it. It should be the easiest thing in the world. I’m not asking the dog to sit, lie down, turn in circles, or do any tricks. All the dog has to do is walk forward and eat out of my hand.
During this process, I start to teach my dog how to eat the food gently, and where to find it physically. I present it close to my body, at about head-height for the dog. Typically this will be around my shins when dealing with an eight-week-old puppy.
Depending on the energy level and drive of the puppy, the sessions will be various lengths of time. In these early sessions, it’s important to leave the dog always wanting a little bit more food. When the dog’s motivation for the food starts to wane, I make sure to give one last reward for coming to me, and then I say “all done,” and put the food back in my pocket and do something else.
As soon as the dogs are more mobile, I start with them in the yard with the same exercise: I walk away from them, they run to me, I feed them.
I often don’t put a leash on my dog from 8 to 16 weeks. There may be some exceptions, but mainly my dog is following me around because it is hungry and that’s what it knows: just follow dad. Somewhere in that range of weeks, dogs become a bit more adventurous, and even though I have a fenced in yard, I make sure to put my dog on leash, so that I don’t have to chase him around if he decides not to come back with me.
When the dog follows me around and eats the food out of my hands easily, I can start luring the dog into other positional commands like sit, down, and positions in relation to me, like come, heel, place, walk. I usually will not use verbal commands until the dog is absolutely sure that the physical behaviors I’m asking him to do are highly rewarding.
I can also start to teach my dogs skills like going around cones or telephone poles or structures, going over jumps or obstacles, and starting to retrieve items in exchange for food. You can begin to teach your dog this at a very young age. Almost every dog has the ability to work like this. There are exceptions, of course, but over my 20-year career, only a total of two or three puppies ever fit in this category. Rarely you will come across a dog that won’t work for food as a puppy. However, dogs do not have a tendency to starve themselves, so it is unlikely that your dog will do so. There are dogs that will only work for short periods of time, or for very small amounts of food, and then quit, but there are rarely dogs that will completely refuse to eat food, especially at this young age.
Most of the time, people just don’t wait long enough. You may not get your dog to eat from your hand if he recently had a meal from a bowl. Over a couple of days of trying this though exclusively hand feeding, I promise that your dog will come around.
I personally do this with my dogs until around nine months old. Initially, the schedule of feedings is pretty frequent. I often feed my dog every time I take it outside to potty–around five times a day or more if they are only 8 to 10 weeks old. As my dog grows up, I move to four times a day, then three times a day, and even continue to feed at two times a day from the hand. That’s two training sessions where I make sure that the dog works for every single piece of kibble they get.
As they get older, dogs can be working for longer periods of time without reinforcement, and the reinforcement periods can be longer. Instead of giving three pieces of kibble every couple seconds after a command, I may be doing ten individual reward events after a few minutes of training. It’s the process of going from being paid for piecework to being on salary.
Long-term, my dogs need to understand that they have to work, regardless if I have shown them food, or if they know that I have food in my pocket, but puppies just need to believe that I always have food, and that I will always have food…forever.
It’s pretty cheap when you think about the cost of willingness. If all it costs for you to have an incredible relationship with your dog and develop a puppy the right way is to have a little kibble in your pocket, what are you waiting for?
