What makes a treat high value

Ask most people what a high-value treat is and they will describe an ingredient. Chicken. Liver. Cheese. That is the wrong end of the question.

High value is a ranking, not a recipe. A treat is high value if your dog puts it near the top of their own list - above the dry kibble in their bowl, above the smell of another dog, above the ute reversing down the street. It is defined by your dog, not by the packaging. Which means the only way to know what is high value to your dog is to test it.

Why the ranking matters more than the treat

Training is almost never a contest between doing the thing and doing nothing. It is a contest between doing the thing and doing something else that is already rewarding.

Your dog is at the park. You ask for a recall. On one side of the ledger: coming back to you. On the other: a bird, a smell in the grass, a puppy fifty metres away. If the treat in your pocket is worth less than the bird, you lose - and you have not lost because your dog is stubborn or badly trained. You have lost an arithmetic problem.

This is the whole practical point of a high-value treat. You are not bribing. You are raising your side of the ledger until it clears the distraction. In your lounge room with nothing happening, a piece of kibble is plenty. At the park, it is not even close.

Which leads to a rule that is easy to say and hard to follow: save your best treat for your hardest ask. If you spend the good stuff on a sit in the kitchen, you have nothing left when it counts.

What the research actually shows

Three findings are worth knowing, and one of them will probably surprise you.

Dogs get bored of the same reward. Bremhorst and colleagues (2018) tested whether dogs prefer varied food rewards or the same one every time. Individual dogs split fairly evenly - but the preference for variety grew as the session went on. The researchers concluded that varying the reward type may help maintain a dog’s motivation over a longer training session. Practically: rotating two or three treats beats hammering one, especially in a long session.

Dogs notice when the reward gets worse. Riemer, Thompson and Burman (2018) gave dogs a high-value reward, then unexpectedly downgraded it. The dogs changed their behaviour - they searched more, moving between food patches more often than dogs whose reward had not changed. Interestingly, this looked like functional searching rather than distress, and the effect was stronger in dogs rated as more trainable. Practically: do not quietly downgrade mid-session and expect the same performance.

And the surprise - food is not automatically king. Cook, Prichard, Spivak and Berns (2016) scanned fifteen dogs’ brains while they anticipated either food or praise from their owner. Thirteen of the fifteen showed roughly equal or greater reward-related activation for praise than for food. A few strongly preferred social reward; only two clearly preferred food. The neural pattern predicted what each dog chose in a real behavioural test.

That last one deserves to be taken seriously by anyone selling treats, including us. Food is a reliable, portable, repeatable reinforcer - not a universal one. For a meaningful share of dogs, your delight is worth as much as anything in your pocket. The best training usually pairs them: the treat marks the moment, and you supply the enthusiasm.

Why freeze-dried works well for this job

Set aside nutrition for a second and think about the mechanics of a training treat. It has to be:

• Small. You may reward twenty or thirty times in a ten-minute session. A biscuit is a meal at that rate.
• Fast to eat. Anything your dog has to chew for fifteen seconds breaks the rhythm and loses the connection between the behaviour and the reward.
• Strong-smelling. Smell is how your dog registers that something worthwhile just happened, often before they have even swallowed it.
• Not unpleasant to carry. If a treat is greasy or damp, it stays in a cupboard, and a treat in a cupboard trains nothing.

Freeze-drying suits all four. Removing the water at low temperature - rather than cooking it out - leaves a light, dry, crumbly piece that breaks into smaller pieces with your fingers, keeps its smell, and does not leave a slick in your pocket.

On the nutrition side, one thing is worth stating carefully. A 2022 study by Juknienė and colleagues on lyophilised (freeze-dried) meat found the process did not significantly affect protein or fat content, with protein losses under 1%, and that essential amino acid composition was broadly maintained - a few amino acids showed small but measurable decreases. That study looked at protein, amino acids and fatty acids. It did not test vitamins, so we will not claim anything about those.

How much is too much

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association’s guidance is straightforward: treats should make up no more than 10% of a dog’s daily calorie intake. Their own reference table runs from about 14 calories a day for a 2 kg dog to about 146 calories for a 45 kg dog.

That is not a large budget, and it is the reason treat size matters as much as treat quality. A cube broken into four pieces is four rewards. Whole, it is one - for four times the calories and no more training value. WSAVA also make the obvious-but-worth-saying point that treats should never replace meals; a dog still needs a complete and balanced diet.

If your dog has a medical condition or is on a prescription diet, check with your vet before adding anything new.

Find out what your dog actually rates

Take three or four different treats. Offer two at a time, one in each closed hand, and let your dog choose. Run each pairing a few times, swapping hands so you are not accidentally testing which side they prefer. You will have a ranking in about five minutes.

Then use it deliberately. Bottom of the list for easy repetitions at home. Top of the list for the recall at the park, the vet’s waiting room, the thing they find hard.

That is what high value means. Not what is written on the front of the bag - what your dog would choose when something else is also on offer.

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KYNTAY freeze-dried chicken cubes are a single-ingredient treat designed for exactly this job: small, dry, and easy to break down into training-sized pieces. They are a treat and a meal topper, not a complete diet.

Sources

• Bremhorst, A., Bütler, S., Würbel, H. and Riemer, S. (2018). Incentive motivation in pet dogs - preference for constant vs varied food rewards. Scientific Reports.
• Riemer, S., Thompson, H. and Burman, O. (2018). Behavioural responses to unexpected changes in reward quality. Scientific Reports.
• Cook, P., Prichard, A., Spivak, M. and Berns, G. (2016). Awake canine fMRI predicts dogs’ preference for praise vs food. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
• Juknienė, I. et al. (2022). Effect of lyophilisation process on nutritional value of meat by-products. Applied Sciences.
• World Small Animal Veterinary Association. Feeding treats to your dog.