If the idea of giving junk food to your dog appalls you, don’t read this. But I will say that my concoction of goopy stuff is healthier than the original.
I won’t make you read the history of the world before presenting the recipe. To save some of you from scrolling down, here’s my best substitute for canned spray cheese. But feel free to read the story of my experimentation. It will probably help with your own. Also, Cheez Whiz is a U.S. product; I have ideas for my friends in other countries at the end of the post.
One thing I notice about experienced trainers is how well they can deliver food to dogs. Usually their hand motions are both fast and quiet, and the food goes just where they intend. This may sound like a minor issue, but it’s not. The mechanics of training are the key to successful, efficient training and a non-frustrated dog.
Sorry I’m not filling my pans as neatly as I did before! That part got old.
I posted in January about making hundreds of small treats at a time in a silicone pan. I had no idea how lucky I was that I hit on a recipe that worked so well the first time. You can check out that chicken-based recipe and some details about the pan in this post. It seems that you need to have enough binding ingredients in these recipes or things get…sticky.
I am all about efficiency. You could also say I’m lazy. Also, my freezer is usually stuffed full.
So rather than freeze whole filled food toys for three dogs, I use several gadgets that let me freeze things separately. Then I can put frozen dog treats (of all sorts—just look!) into food toys for a quick treat for the dogs that they can enjoy for a few minutes.
Spaghetti Bolognese as a training treat? Is that even possible? See below!
OK, I’m going to break the ultimate taboo here and talk about giving so-called “people food” to dogs. [1]Nutritionist Linda Case points out aptly in the comments that even the term “people food” is inaccurate and comprises a completely false dichotomy. I won’t use it anymore, even to … Continue reading
Most of us who do positive reinforcement training and counterconditioning are already accustomed to giving our dogs some pretty special, high value stuff at times. Tuna, ham, Gorgonzola cheese; most anything fragrant and full of calories has been tried at one time or another.
But these types of foods have something in common, and that is that most consist of one basic flavor.
Nutritionist Linda Case points out aptly in the comments that even the term “people food” is inaccurate and comprises a completely false dichotomy. I won’t use it anymore, even to make a point.
A food tube (aka squeeze tube) is a vehicle for delivering soft, tasty food straight into your dog’s mouth. Food tubes are great for general dog training when high value treats are needed. They are also invaluable for doing desensitization/counterconditioning for dogs with fear issues.
There is a trick for using food tubes successfully, and just as with the non-crumbly treat recipe, I’m going to tell you right up front. I wish someone had told me, because the first time I ever tried a food tube, it didn’t work for us and I didn’t try it again for more than a year.
The secret to good use of a food tube is to get the filling just the right consistency. If it is too solid or dry, like ground up roasted white meat chicken without much moisture, it won’t extrude correctly. Likewise if it’s lumpy. If it’s too liquid-y, like chicken baby food or plain yogurt, it drips out when you are not trying to feed your dog and makes a mess.
So what you do is either buy something that is already the right consistency, or mix and match different filling types to achieve that in a do-it-yourself way.
The rest of the post covers what you can buy and what you can make, and has a few other tips for successful use.
The Easiest Way
Here is the very easiest way to use a food tube for successful high value treat delivery:
Buy a couple of Coghlan’s squeeze tubes from REI or Amazon.
Go to a pet food or grocery store and buy a can of pureed style dog or cat food. Or for raw feeders, get finely ground meat.
Put the lid on the tube, turn the tube upside down, and spoon the food in. If there is separate juice in the canned food, save it for something else.
Squeeze the air out, fold over the bottom, and close with the included clamp.
Take off the lid and offer a squirt to your dog when he does something right. You will become a god in his eyes. (And he’ll soon learn how to get the goodness efficiently into his mouth!)
Mixing It Yourself
Zani loves the white meat chicken & baby food mixture
Again, it’s all about the consistency. In the series of pictures above: the “too thick” one was 8 oz of baked white meat chicken, chopped fine in a food processor. The “too thin” one was 2.5 oz of Gerber chicken baby food straight out of the jar. The Goldilocks version was simply those two things combined in that proportion.
So that gives you the idea. In most cases, if you use 3–4 parts of something thick cut with 1 part of something thinner, you’ll probably hit the sweet spot. Here are some suggestions to choose from. Be mindful of the fat content whenever you give your dog rich stuff. Some of these adapt very well to low fat though.
Canned tripe (but every once in a while there is a piece of…something…that doesn’t want to go through the hole). That stuff is crack for dogs, though.
Canned pumpkin
Small curd cottage cheese
Thickeners
(These are things you can add to something that is too drippy. See Micha’s filling method below.)
Oat or rice flour
Guar gum
Tapioca flour
Tips
Test the mixture at the temperature at which you will be using it. Most will be softer at room temperature, more solid when refrigerated.
Test the consistency by taking off the lid and pointing the end down. If filling drips out without squeezing, it’s too thin.
Avoid canned foods that say “chunky,” “stew,” “homestyle,” or “flakes.”
If canned food is too moist, let it drain in a strainer–Randi Rossman.
Fillings
(Thank you to members of the Facebook Fearful Dogs Group for fillings suggestions and others throughout this post!)
Canned dog or cat food: pureed or mousse style. Examples: Wellness 95% canned food; Newman’s Own Organic Dog Food (Debbie Jacobs of Fearfuldogs.com says this one cuts nicely with canned pumpkin); Friskies pâté style canned cat food.
Cheez Whiz (the U.S. stuff in a jar) mixed half and half with canned pumpkin. This makes a passable substitute for spray cheese, which can be hard to find.
Honest Kitchen dehydrated dog food (rehydrated of course!).
Heather’s dogs are crazy about this liverwurst!
Heather Edgar of Caninesteins says: “The hands-down favourite of all of my dogs is liverwurst. If you wanted to dilute it down because it’s both high calorie and a bit thick, it could be pureed with a baby food veg or cooked pureed vegetables–the easiest is probably using jarred baby food sweet potato.”
Alex Bliss starts with pureed baby food and adds chicken breast, a tin of sardines, or tuna. She says that low fat soft cheese is also very popular with her dogs as a base for other flavors.
You can use pure peanut butter at room temperature, but oh, the calories! You’d better have a big dog or a very special occasion!
Ground raw meat for the raw feeders!
Deb Manheim CPDT-KA, CDBC of Happy Tails Family Dog Training purees the special diet of one of her dogs: baked North Atlantic cod and rice congee with vegetables. If you home cook for your dog already, this could be a very straightforward solution.
Micha Michlewicz starts with a protein or fruit, perhaps some veggies, and then oat or rice flour as a binder. She too mentions that you can blend up your dog’s meals and make a paste for the tube.
Dr. Jenny LeMoine suggests boiled chicken breasts, thinned down with the broth, and some yogurt mixed in as an optional treat.
The tube on the left in the large photo at the top of the post has: 4 oz Neufchatel cheese, 1/2 oz peanut butter, and 1 oz skim milk. The one on the right has commercial cat food!
Tripe: crack for dogs.
Other Tubes: Commercial or Do It Yourself
I really like the tubes like Coghlan’s with a screw top and clamp because they are so resistant to leaks and mess. I have used the same two tubes in agility for years and used them hard. I throw them ahead of my dogs and have never once had a leak or explosion. That being said, here are some alternatives. Readers, if you know of other tubes, let me know and I’ll add them.
Used mustard or other condiment squeeze container. Denise Donnelly Zomisky has experimented with this: she says you need to play around with the texture of the filling.
A sandwich bag, sealed, with a lower corner cut off –suggested by a Fearful Dogs member
Organic baby food in a pouch–a couple of people suggested this!
Here’s another food that’s already in a tube: Carly Loveless points out that in Norway you can buy flavored cream cheese in a tube, including bacon flavored. How cool is that? And bacon sounds like a nice flavor for a homemade version as well.
The secret is to use tapioca flour.[1]A reader has let me know that tapioca flour and tapioca starch are the same thing, and the latter is much cheaper. It can be found in most Asian markets and other stores as well. Thank you Lili! If you can wing it in the kitchen, read no farther. You’re on your way.
This is not usually a recipe blog, but it is definitely a concept blog. The concept here is that lots of high value brownie-type dog treats are crumbly and fall apart in your hand, treat bag, or pocket. Ewww. Especially if they are made with cornmeal, but even with wheat or most other flours.
Tapioca flour (or tapioca starch) is the trick. (It’s also grain free, for folks who care about that.) If it is expensive, you can experiment and cut it with some cheaper flour and see how far you can go. My other trick is that you can use all sorts of leftovers instead of one protein source for the treats, including that you can save the voluminous crumbs that many store-bought treats exude.
Here is the general method I follow for brownies.
Easy Brownies for Dogs
Puree in a food processor:
1 cup raw or cooked protein (see some suggestions below)
1-2 eggs, depending on the moistness of your other ingredients
Put the puree into a bowl and stir in:
About 1 cup tapioca flour/starch, or a mixture of tapioca and other flour. You may need more or less, depending on your protein sources.
Mix well. It will stay a little sticky, but if it is too sticky to handle, add more flour. Toss it between your hands to make a patty and plot it into a greased pan. Bake at 350F for about 15-20 minutes. Longer if you used raw ingredients.
This is what went in mine (pictured below), just to give you some ideas:
1/3 cup leftover meat from fajitas: beef, chicken, even a shrimp
a few french fries
1/2 cup crumbs from commercial dog treats: mostly Natural Balance dog food roll and Stella and Chewies dehydrated raw treats, both of which crumble massively
1 tablespoon leftover Parmesan cheese crumbs
The mixture I used above yielded brownies that actually smelled like bacon. I think that was from the smoky flavor of the Natural Balance dog food roll. It wasn’t a terrible smell, and the dogs loved them. I have also made some very mild ones with chicken breast and a dollop of peanut butter. Those even smell kind of good to me!
The very easiest version is to use a can of tuna or salmon. Usually in that case I would use just one egg. You still need to puree it.
Even with the high-priced tapioca flour, these are far cheaper than any commercial treats that are this high value. And so much more pleasant to carry around.
Here’s a photo essay on making my version of the brownies. Hah. These aren’t beautiful photos, and any food blogger would scoff at them. But hopefully they get the point across.
Preheat oven to 350 and blend meat scraps with 1-2 eggs
Mix in tapioca flour
Use enough flour so it’s not too sticky
Grease a pan
Make a patty about 1/2 inch thick
Drop it in. Bake 15 min @ 350 F.
Let it cool a bit
Cut it up
Cut some more
Nice pieces!
Hardly any crumbs.
And they stay that way.
Thank you to Anita Gard, who provided the first recipe I saw that used tapioca flour. Her treats are more moist, even less crumbly (they are rubbery), and bake longer. Here is her recipe:
Liver Dog Treats
Ingredients:
Equal parts (by volume) raw chicken livers and tapioca starch/flour. For example, about 1 1/2 lbs livers and 2 cups of tapioca flour work well.
2 TB oil
Method:
Put ingredients in a blender/food processor and blend until smooth. Line a cookie sheet (not a completely flat one; it needs edges) with parchment paper. Pour in the goop and spread it flat. It should be less than 1/2 inch thick. Bake at 300F for 30 minutes or until done.
Cool in pan. Then lift the whole thing out with the parchment paper. Flip it over onto a large cutting board and peel off the parchment. Use a pizza cutter to cut into appropriate sized treats for your dogs.
Any More?
Feel free to share your favorite dog treat recipes or methods!
A reader has let me know that tapioca flour and tapioca starch are the same thing, and the latter is much cheaper. It can be found in most Asian markets and other stores as well. Thank you Lili!
When questioned about possible weight problems from training with food, we R+ trainers always say something like, “No problem! Just subtract the training calories from your dogs’ daily meals and it will work out!”
For me, that’s not as easy as it sounds.
Am I the only one for whom this is a problem? Sometimes I wonder before I publish these kinds of things exactly how many people are as compulsive as I am have situations similar to mine. But then I figure that the world is a big place, so perhaps this will help somebody out there.
Here’s my situation:
I have three dogs who vary in size, who all love to be trained;
I want everybody to have approximately the same number of reps in training;
I hate counting kibble; and
I don’t want to use all the dogs’ kibble for training.
And here’s is a graphic representation of the problem:
For each doggie meal, Clara gets a generous 1/2 cup, Summer gets 1/3 cup, and Zani gets 1/4 cup.
Clara’s, Summer’s, and Zani’s meals
So let’s say I want to take out 30 pieces of kibble from each for training. That will generally let each dog work on one to three behaviors.
Look what happens to their meals:
Clara’s, Summer’s, and Zani’s meals after training treats removed
Poor Zani! It only puts a dent in Clara’s meal, it leaves a halfway decent amount for Summer, but Zani is left with less than half of her meal! That bugs me! One of the reasons I virtually always feed my dogs before training is that I don’t want them working on an empty stomach. And Zani may be littler, but it’s not fair taking away such a bigger percentage of her food!
But on the other hand, if I take away less of her meal, she gets fewer training reps than the other two.
And here I am still counting kibble.
Two-Part Solution
I finally figured out what to do.
1) Switch Zani to smaller kibble. I shopped around and found a comparable kibble with smaller, but not tiny bites. It’s nice for carrying around in my pocket for training treats, too. Here’s what their meals look like now, with approximately 30 pieces removed for training.
Clara’s, Summer’s, and Zani’s meals, training treats removed, after Zani’s food switch
So Zani has the same number of training reps as the others, but still has the majority of her meal intact. (Now Summer is the one who looks a little cheated, but I’m going to say this is the best I can do for now.)
2) Weigh the kibble, don’t count it. I don’t mind giving a plug for my trusty Oxo kitchen scale here. I switch it to grams for weighing kibble, since I can get a little more precision that way. Believe it or not, that’s 30 pieces of Zani’s new kibble on the scale. For me, weighing is a lot quicker than counting.
Weighing kibble on kitchen scale
Everybody’s different. Some people would never consider switching a dog’s food just to change kibble size. But this solution works for me because I tend to switch my dogs’ kibble around every once in a while anyway, just to make sure they are getting a variety of the lesser nutrients. So that doesn’t bother me. Plus none of mine has any particular digestive issues (knock on wood).
On days when I don’t plan any training, I can switch Zani back to the old kibble, or switch the other dogs to hers if I want. (Another consideration is whether the foods have a similar calorie count per volume or weight. Mine worked out to be close enough without any extra tinkering necessary.)
Sorry this doesn’t offer anything to the raw feeders, who have a whole different set of challenges.
I would love to hear from some folks with a bigger spread in their dogs’ weights. What do you all do?
Coming Up:
BarkBusters: Myths about Barking
Why Counterconditioning Didn’t “Work”
How Skilled are You at Ignoring? (Extinction Part 2)
Emergency Method:If you are currently in a struggle trying to administer a pill to a reluctant dog, try the multiple meatball method. The other techniques in this blog are specialized and probably won’t help in an emergency situation.
Longterm Training Method: If you are in the opposite situation and have the time to train your dog from scratch to take any kind of pill you need her to, without force or disguising the pill, read my post on how I taught my dog to take a (plain) pill with positive reinforcement. Also check out where I originally got the idea: Laura VanArendonk Baugh’s post “An Easy Pill to Swallow.” In my opinion, this is the gold standard method.
Now that I’ve sent half of you away, is anybody still here? Following is the original inspiration for writing this post.
Administering Pills with Spray Cheese and Food Tubes
If your dogs already eat spray cheese sometimes, or will eat a moist mixture out of a food tube, this idea could save you some time and hassle.
I realized a few months back that spray cheese extruding out of the can, as well as moist food exiting a squeeze tube, both make excellent “carriers” for pills.
My dog Summer takes a small thyroid pill twice a day, and having several options for administering it makes it easy. I often have a food tube with some leftovers from a training session in the refrigerator, and the spray cheese is a staple at my house. For Summer, it only takes a tiny bit.
We Can Train This
When I read Laura Baugh’s post on teaching a dog to take a pill, I was chagrined. Why had it never occurred to me that we could teach a dog to swallow pills just like we teach them other behaviors? Zoo and marine mammal trainers train this kind of thing all the time, so why not dogs? Most of the pill administration methods out there for dogs (including most of the ones linked in this post) depend on trying to disguise the pill. Older ones use plain old force to open the dog’s mouth and put the pill in, then hold the dog’s mouth closed. That’s unnecessary in this day and age.
I haven’t had to put a bunch of energy into disguising pills over the years. My dogs have a huge reinforcement history for sucking cheese and other goodies out of gizmos and for eating gobs of peanut butter. They get these things daily whether they are taking pills or not. It doesn’t seem to be a big deal when there are pills present. Still, I’m glad that I finally got around to teaching Clara to take pills in a straightforward manner. It’s a useful behavior, whether I use it every time or not.
More inspiration for those of us teetering on the edge of training this behavior. See Michelle Chan shape her sheltie Juliet to take pills in one impressive, less than three minute session: Juliet Pops Pills.
Nickala Squire points out that crunchy peanut butter disguises pills better than smooth. What a good observation! I’ve been using it ever since.
And Tegan Whalen suggests washing one’s hands between handling the pill and administering the treat. Another great idea.
Food Tube Info
Summer is ready for the food tube, pill or not!
I use food tubes for high value treats, both for Clara’s socialization sessions, where we do lots of counterconditioning, and in agility. I actually throw these tubes ahead of the running dog in agility, so they are tough. I’ve never had one come apart or have the lid or clamp pop off. I buy them online at REI. (Google “Coughlan squeeze tube” if that URL ever goes out of date.)
You don’t always have to use high calorie or high fat treats in them, either. I’ve made a mixture of pumpkin, low fat yogurt, and some peanut butter that my dogs really like. The trick is to get the right texture. If it’s too runny or not homogeneous, it will drip out of the tube and make a mess. If it’s too thick or has lumps, it won’t come out well. Experiment a little to find the Goldilocks point and you will be in business.
Let me know if you try anything new, either from this post and the linked resources, or from something completely different. Especially if it works!
