Most of us have experienced what it feels like when a dog takes treats like a shark. We probably know some situations in which our dogs do that and what it might mean. But what about when a dog takes a treat extra gently?
I’ve been writing about dog body language since I began this blog. I recently realized that treat-taking falls under body language. Sometimes we feel it more than we see it, but it’s still behavior that can give us a clue to a dog’s emotional state.
I have not seen this discussed much. Usually I see the binary question: Will the dog take food or not? This is followed by a conclusion about whether the dog is “over threshold.” But there is an entire spectrum of nuance we are missing if we limit ourselves to a yes or no answer. I questioned the binary model years ago and discussed it in this post. Now I’m going a step further.
If a dog suddenly seizes treats, or suddenly takes them gingerly, we need to pay attention! And the latter is harder to notice, since we are less likely to take note when the treat-taking doesn’t hurt us.
Soft Mouth and Hard Mouth Can Be General Labels
First, some discussion of terminology. Some people will say that their dog has a “soft mouth” or a “hard mouth” in general. A soft mouth is desirable in working retrievers because a dog’s gentle pick up and carry leaves the bird intact. A hard mouth is undesirable in most situations. I asked a friend who does bite sports about it, since I figured it might be a point of discussion there. They said their colleagues would be more likely to say a dog has a “firm grip” on the bite sleeve than a hard mouth (and a firm grip is a good thing).
So I’m not talking about these qualities: how a dog carries something or how they bite on cue. I’m also not talking about how hard dogs bite people or animals in incidents of aggression.
I’m talking about how dogs take treats, how dogs take food from our hands. Also, I’m using the terms situationally, not as general labels. Because this behavior varies! How a dog takes a treat can tell us a lot about what’s going on with them in that moment.
Let’s Operationalize the Terms
Here are the characteristics I associate with “hard mouth” and “soft mouth.”
Hard Mouth
- The dog’s teeth close on my fingers when she takes the treat enough that it is uncomfortable. I.e., she bites me.
- The dog may leap or snatch at my hand as she closes her teeth hard. In this case there is not only uncomfortable pressure, but her teeth drag on my hand.
Soft Mouth
- The dog stops short of my hand and takes the treat with her tongue or lips.
- The dog puts her mouth around my fingers, but I feel her teeth only in a very minor, glancing way.
I can use this information!
How Clara Takes Treats
Clara is a “stresser-upper.” When she gets aroused and agitated, she takes treats harder, plain and simple. But also, faster movement can do it. Practicing walking on leash with her was very painful when she was younger because all it took was the motion of walking and she took treats harder. I guess we could still classify that as arousal.
Also, she takes treats harder if I give them to her more quickly. My bad; it’s usually because I am trying to get a treat in before she moves. (Yes, I know about that thing called the clicker, haha.) Jerking one’s hand back to protect fingers can start a vicious circle of the dog snapping to get the treat, and Clara and I have gone down that road in the past, too.
Finally, she is more bitey when I offer a high value treat, but that says more about the treat than her emotional state at the moment. That’s a typical response for a lot of dogs.
How Zani Took Treats
Zani was the inspiration for this post. Because Zani, who had a soft mouth most of the time, got a softer mouth when she got upset. When she was bothered by something, she tended to check out rather than act out.
So if we were moving along, say, on a walk, and suddenly she took a treat softly, I would check on her. She was usually nervous about something. Here is the order of Zani’s types of treat-taking, from an emotional state of normal to fearful.
- Takes treat normally; I may feel her teeth but only passing by.
- Takes treat softly and gingerly; uses just her lips and tongue.
- Won’t take treat from my hand; usually turns her head away. But will take it if I put it on the ground.
- Won’t take treat at all.
I find the third condition fascinating. But it tracks for Zani, who was sensitive to spatial and social pressure.
In the image at the top, Zani was taking a treat in her normal gentle way. She was not upset, to my knowledge.
In the video embedded in this blog post, I show Zani refusing treats on a walk. I assessed that she was seeking other reinforcement. I still perceive that to be true, but on looking at the video, I see some anxiety, too. Zani went through some difficult periods in her life when she was very anxious, so it may have been her baseline then. It stands out to me now.
How Lewis Takes Treats
Lewis both stresses up and stresses down with his treat taking.
He can get sharky when he’s aroused, and will take treats harder when there is another dog close by, because he’s guardy. But he takes treats more softly when worried and has a progression like Zani’s.
His most interesting behavior, though, isn’t easily classified. Sometimes when there is movement involved, he will take my entire hand in his mouth, but he doesn’t always close his teeth hard. So the photo comparison at the top is not showing him biting me (or about to bite me). He was enveloping a large part of my hand, but not biting down hard. You can see that in the video below. In some cases, I am presenting my hand flat, and in some I am offering my fingers. He gobbles the hand every time (because I am cuing him to run around and he is excited), but doesn’t hurt me.
He has great bite inhibition in play; his control when gulping treats out of my hand may correlate with that.
Training for Gentle Treat-Taking
There are ways to teach dogs to take treats gently. One is to hold onto the treat if you feel the dog’s teeth, releasing when they use only their lips and tongue. Another, which involves less extinction and negative punishment, is to teach the dog the difference between licking and biting, then put “lick” on cue. I have seen consistent people (i.e., mostly trainers) succeed with these methods. There are also situational tricks like feeding a dog only through a barrier, such as the wires of a crate. I suspect you’d have to do hundreds of reps that way (and put other treat delivery on hiatus) to get the behavior to generalize to other situations.
For us civilians, trying to modify a dog’s treat-taking behavior if we’ve already been giving them food from our hands for a while puts us squarely up against the matching law. The way they take a treat is so easy to reinforce. It’s the last behavior before they swallow the food. So if your pup has been taking treats like a shark for a few weeks and you decide you want to change that, you may already have an uphill battle. You’ll need to be consistent, which is difficult. In how many situations do you give your dog treats? Plus, that consistency can put the dog through an extinction process—”Hey, this used to work to get me food!”—which can frustrate them.
Clara was grabby as a pup, and I made some feeble efforts toward changing her treat-taking behavior. But I was doing a lot of classical conditioning, and getting her comfortable in her environment was more important than protecting my hands. Because if you “withhold” the treat when trying to create a classical pairing, you risk weakening the pairing. Putting a contingency on getting the food is a reasonable step in this process, but we couldn’t do that for a very long time.
There are many variables involved in how feasible and important it is to modify a dog’s treat-taking. But if you teach your dog to take treats gently, you may still get feedback on your dog’s emotional state from how they take the food, but likely in more subtle ways.
“Is the Dog Taking Food?” vs. “How Is the Dog Taking Food?”
The latter is a better question.
I’m not the first to discuss this. But the articles I found focused on sharky treat-taking. None of them mentioned that gentle treat-taking can also be a warning sign of stress or fear. Taking treats gingerly seems like a natural precursor to not taking them at all. Thanks, Zani, for teaching me that.
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Copyright 2024 Eileen Anderson
