A Guide to Lure Reward Training

What is Bait Training?

Bait training, also known as lure reward training, is a method of dog training where you harness your dog’s prey drive to encourage desired behavior. By using food as a lure, you tap into your dog’s natural instincts to motivate them to follow commands and perform tasks daily. This method leverages the connection between a dog's fundamental instincts and their responsiveness to rewards.

Understanding Prey Drive

Prey drive refers to the innate, instinctual behavior that is hardwired into every dog as part of their survival mechanisms. Trainers often categorize prey drive as one of the three primary drives all dogs possess. Within this drive, a dog exhibits both active and passive behaviors, each playing a role in how the dog reacts to stimuli.

Active Prey Behaviors

Active prey behaviors are aggressive, goal-oriented actions that dogs exhibit when engaging with prey-related stimuli. These behaviors include:

• Hunting
• Chasing
• Catching
• Killing
• Eating

When you see your dog exhibiting the above behavior he is in active prey drive.  Other notable active prey behaviors are stalking, gripping, and maintaining focus.   

Passive prey behaviors

Passive prey behaviors are less aggressive, goal-oriented actions that dogs exhibit when engaging in passive prey-related stimuli.  These behaviors include:

• Lying down
• Standing still
• Waiting
• Being quiet

When you see your dog exhibiting the above behavior he is in passive prey drive.  Other notable passive prey behaviors maintaining intense eye contact or fixed gaze, completely motionless, including slowing their breathing down to an almost stopped point. 

Hard Wired Behavior is Instincts

Dogs are natural survivalists that prey on other animals.  Prey drive, patience and the ability to be quiet and stealthy is part of the big picture of prey drive.  For example, an ancestral dog hunts for his food, when he finds his food, he must catch, hold and kill.  The last behavior is eating. 

• Prey drive is a reactive drive that is stimulus specific.
• Such as food can cause your dog to become prey driven and act out with one of the behaviors associated. Toys and live prey also trigger the dogs prey drive.

When a dog is in the presence of live prey animals, this animals’ presence “triggers the dog to go into prey” behavior as an automatic response.  A dog can instantly go “into prey state of mind”.  It is an intense mental state where your dog is gearing up to hunt for food.  Your dog’s meal is triggers “prey eat” behavior and is an automatic response to stimuli.  Think Pavlov.   Your treat you offer to your dog is the stimuli that triggers and fulfills the dog. 

Prey Model Training

 It is to utilize prey behavior at a more end stage of hunt behavior evolution.   Present day lure reward training is bait training.  Bait training is the foundational method of Prey Model Training. When you choose to lure your dog with a treat to do something for you, you are baiting your dog with food, triggering his prey behavior and making his predatory nature more dominant. When done properly you can satisfy predatory behavior using bait feeding your dog his meal out of task, during daily training sessions rather than feed him from a bowl.

Some advantages and disadvantages of Prey Model Training

It sounds wonderful to train our dogs using food because we can lure him to do what we want.  As long as he wants the food it does work to our advantage.  When training a dog that is not prey driven, this method does not work.  Non prey driven dogs must train Social Method Dog Training.

Common dogs that are active prey behavior baiting him with food can work to our advantage to manage the evolution of prey aggression.  When we are training a high-strung active prey dog, we can overstimulate the dog with the basic presence of food (remember it is a trigger for the dog).  This type of high drive dog is already “active in prey” (the active prey behavior mentioned in this article are seen) the food further activates the prey behavior, but when a dog is already “in drive” it leads to overactive stimulus mind set.  The food baiting leads the dog on (state of mind using manipulation) creates over salivation response which indicates high degree of stress related to the stimulus.   Equally this disadvantage can create handler food aggressive behavior which means the dog directs his aggression on to the handler and the others around him.

This type of dog can benefit from discontinuing prey model, lowering his stress levels, decrease triggers and begin utilizing Social Model Training to build social behavior and leadership through pack structure.  Dogs are pack animals and social behavior is another strong innate behavior that most dogs possess.

Conclusion

There are two main types of training models professional dog trainers utilize. Social Model Training and Prey Model Training.   Present day lure reward training is bait training.  Bait training is the foundational method of Prey Model Training.    Utilizing the dog’s natural predatory behavior and shaping the dog to respond to the handler in the presence of food (bait-prey-feed).  Instead of being fed from a bowl the dog is bait fed out of training and tasks. To manage dogs long term prey behavior there is often toy training that a prey model handler and dog build up from food to toys.  In our program this begins in Level 2 obedience for family protection teams or athletes as it is more skilled training style.  Generally prey model is not desired with service dog teams due to work environments where dogs are employed.  Social Model Training is preferred method for service and wellness teams.  There are pros and cons associated with Prey Training Method.