11/2/2018
Upbringing the dog and dealing with its behavioural problems should be considered two separate things.
While dealing with its behavioural problems, food (treats) is one of the tools, but here, the focus is on teaching the dog certain commands – and the food (treats) should not be used.
Most common ways of training the dog are: fear imposing and so called positive motivation. Either are not good techniques. These methods will not teach your dog to follow you or listen to you because of you alone. Reasons why fear imposing is not good should be clear to everyone, and "positive motivation" sounds nice until you look closer and see how that exactly works. It is based on using the food as a reward while training the dog. It is a trainer method that is abusing conditional reflex and dog's instinct to survive.
Dogs are beings which have instinct to live in the moment, which makes them drink from dirty puddles even if they just had fair amount of clean, fresh water and then went out for a walk. That is instinct. And that instinct will almost always make them search for an extra bite outside.
Let's use sit command as an example... Sitting position in dog world is calm, and in certain situations even submissive body posture, and state of mind as well. However, if we use food (treats) to teach the dog to sit, just because it will sit does not mean that it is calm. On the contrary, the body learned that sitting position is when it is receiving food, and the mind is excited since the food is a mean of survival. This is how you get a dog that is sitting, but it is extremely excited, which can be seen in its eyes, ear positioning and other body parts language. The dog is sitting but the excitement is greater than when it was standing. Absurd, right?
And why is this method used? Because it takes minimal effort. And what it actually is is creating an unstable dog whose body and mind are not in tune; it is stimulating excitement where the dog is not truly listening to you but being controlled by food.