5 Best Dog Treat Pouches For Training

If you’re going to train your dog on the go, you’ll need the best dog treat pouch available. In other words, having something to store your dog’s rewards can be extremely beneficial for owners that don’t have a lot of living space.

For instance, urban dog owners who live in apartment buildings probably don’t have the necessary amount of room to train their dog indoors effectively. Instead, they’ll probably bring their dog over to the nearby park for their training sessions.

In this case, you’ll need a solid dog training pouch to store your training helpers. I mean, your dog isn’t going to magically learn tricks without some incentive, hence, the treats.

And let’s be honest, you don’t want to get your bag or purse all dog treat smelly either, which is where the pouch comes into play. With all this in mind, it becomes clear that these products are just too practical not to have in a dog owner’s training repertoire.

Therefore, we thought it’d be a good idea to provide you with a dog training pouch buying guide. In doing so, we’ll expose you to the five best dog treat pouches on the market, which will make your buying experience that much easier.

But first, let’s go over some general information about dog training to ensure the overall process is as easy for you as possible.

Why Do We Use Treats to Train Dogs?

In the simplest terms, the reason we use treats for training purpose is it’s much easier to condition a dog’s behavior if there’s some reward. And since dogs don’t need to “learn to salivate whenever they see food”, treats becomes incredibly useful in the training process.

I mean, we use a pup’s behavior of salivating for food to condition them into learning specific trick and commands. Therefore, we use their willingness to end that fixation for introducing positive behaviors.

It becomes embedded in their heads that doing a particular trick or command will end in getting their goodies. And once you have the learned behavior thoroughly ingrained in their mind, the feeling of salivation will overtake them everytime you say the command.

As a result, they’ll do whatever you ask out of them to get that treat, which will satisfy the salivating feeling. Pretty cool, right? Honestly, you’re probably asking yourself exactly how we as species figured out how easily training dogs are through reward-based behavior?

Well, we have this knowledge thanks to a discovery made about 120 years ago by a Russian psychologist named Ivan Pavlov. Ironically, enough he wasn’t even researching dog conditioning when he figured this out. Instead, he was studying the salivation response in dogs to the presence of food.

At first, Pavlov predicted, “the dogs would salivate in response to the food placed in front of them, but he noticed that his dogs would begin to salivate whenever they heard the footsteps of his assistant who was bringing them the food.”

From this discovery, Pavlov began to understand that dogs have the mental capabilities of associating things or in this case people with food. Then, he started to test what he could teach a dog by merely making them associate the act with food.

And from there, the rest is history, which is why you’ll need the best dog training treat pouch to store your dog’s treats. After all, you’ll want to keep the treats as fresh as possible during your training sessions.

But what happens when you want them to do a command, but you don’t have a treat with you. Well, this issue is a common problem dog owners face during the training process. Thankfully, there are specific tips you can use to ensure your dog follows the command even without the food lures.

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Dog Obedience Training Tips

Treats are well and good, but you don’t want to use them all the time. If you do, you might find that your canine is trying to train you. See, dogs aren’t dumb, if they see an action gets them a treat, they might only do when the treats are present.

To avoid this scenario, there are specific tips you can follow that will prevent this dog rebellion from happening. And this section will provide you with steps to ensure your dog doesn’t make you the one being trained.

Step 1: At first, give them treats consistently during training

You need them to make an association between the treat and command. Therefore, when the training first starts, it’s essential you give them a treat every time they obey the command. Honestly, creating this association is the key to any sort of dog training.

Step 2: Think About Using a Clicker with the Treat

A clicker will help embed the behavior into your pup’s mind quicker and give them a second incentive to doing the command. All you have to do is make sure you click the clicker while your dog’s doing the behavior and then rewarding them with a treat. This action will make them associate the clicking with the treat.

Step 3: Offer Other Forms of Reward

Try adding other things to your training that can be seen as rewarding for your dog. For instance, petting your dog or a couple of good boy’s/girl’s could go a long way in removing the treats from the situation. These actions become their own sort of reward and make your dog feel just as good as a treat would.

Step 4: Use Different Reward Methods Randomly

Once you’re confident your dog has learned the command, start offering different rewards for obeying it. For example, maybe give them a treat, then the next time try only petting them. And the time after, try simply saying good boy/girl. The constant switching up will further associate each reward with the command.

It’s also essential you take notice if your dog starts paying less attention to your commands if a treat isn’t present. In this case, make sure you give a treat more often, but still incorporate the other methods because after a while the need for a treat will start to wane.

Besides the above tips for weaning your dog off the treats, you should also try avoiding unhealthy treats. I know, your dog might find the treats with high-fat content more appealing; but I promise if you find the right healthy treats you should have no issues getting your dog to learn tricks and commands.

In my personal experience, I found pieces of high-quality kibble are excellent treats for training activities. After all, your dog is already used to their taste. And if they’re anything like my dogs, they’ll do almost anything for an early piece of their dinner!

It will also make it much easier to pack a substantial amount of treats in your dog training belt considering a single piece of kibble is much smaller than your average Milk Bone. But do remember not to overfeed your dog during these training sessions.

Instead, take a portion out of your dog’s daily food and bring along with you to your training session. Regardless of what you do, you don’t want to add food onto your animal’s diet. It will just increase the risk of unnecessary weight gain.

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The Difference Between Training Techniques

If you plan on training your dog, you must know the difference between bribing, luring, or reward them. In doing so, you’ll make sure that you don’t end up getting trained by them; therefore, ensuring they don’t only do the command for a treat.

• Bribing: Holding the treat in front of their nose and then saying the command is bribing your dog into doing the trick/command you’re asking them to do.
• Luring: You present them the food before getting them to do something. For example, let’s say your dog is outside, and you shake the treat box before calling their name: you’re luring them into doing what you want.
• Reward: Presenting the treat after the command is given.

Still a little confused about the difference? Well, here’s a little scenario, let’s say you’re trying to make your dog learn the sit command. So, if you’re bribing them, you’d push gentle on their back and hold the treat right in front of their nose to get them in a sitting position.

This scenario doesn’t teach them the trick; in fact, it only reinforces they should continue being unresponsive to get the treat. If you’re luring your dog, it might look something like moving closer and closer to them and placing the treat above their nose, effectively, making them sit.

As you might expect, never of these methods would give you the results you desire. Honestly, they will only diminish any progress you made up to that point. Instead, you want to reward them.

In a rewarding scenario, a reward based training technique would be something like putting on their leash and slightly pulling onto it, which would encourage them into doing the behavior. You could also slightly push on their backside at the same time.

Then, once they complete the command, you present them with the treat. See, you’re making them associate completing the learned behavior with getting a positive reward.

In comparison, luring and baiting them makes them associate resisting the command with getting a treat. In the end, it’s all about creating the right environment and take the right steps to make the training sessions productive for both you and your dog.

And having a reliable puppy training treat pouch could make this whole process a whole lot easier because you have somewhere safe/out of your dog’s eyesight to store the treats! Therefore, it’s essential you have the top dog treat bag available for these moments.

Thankfully, you’ll find five excellent examples in sections below.

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Criteria When Choosing Our Top Pick Dog Training Treat Bag

Before we dive into the five favorite dog treat bags, we thought it was essential we explained our criteria about how we’re going to judge each one. Our 1-10 rating system is going to breaking into four different categories: design & comfort, opening, quality, and extras.

Now, I know that’s a little vague. So below, I’m going to go over each category and describe precisely what’s the criteria for each rating category.

Design & Comfort

This particular rating will deal with how practical it’s for the person carrying the pouch around: ease of carry, shoulder strap, attachment options, etc. In other words, all the things that decide whether or not the bag is convenient and comfortable for the dog trainer.

Opening

The opening rating will be based on the bag’s ability to reliably be opened/closed and the overall durability of the zipper or other closing feature.

Quality

This rating will be determined on things like the pouch’s overall durability, features, whether or not it’s machine washable, etc.

Extras

The final rating will be determined by the extra things that purchasing the pouch brings to the table: whether or not you get an accompanying bowl or clicker, additional pockets, color and size options, etc.