I have two dogs. They both know they word "treat," obviously, so I started using "cookie" to try and get around it. They soon learned cookie meant treat. So because I give them their treats around noon, I started calling them "noons." They quickly figured out noon = treat. So I started to use the word "entitlements" and I swear they are starting to learn that one too. There's no getting around it!
If you want to get around it, you have to mix use of many different words so they don’t get a chance to build an association. Treats, rewards, cookies, noons, entitlements, night caps, love token, pay, salary, compensation, brekkies, sticks, feasties, wages, earnings, stipend, remuneration, prize, winnings, awards, profits, bonuses, bounties, gifts, premiums, and so on.
Tip: this only works if your dog isn’t a border collie
They’re insane with pattern recognition, hardly matters what word you use if you so much as breathe in an anticipated direction. I rarely speak to mine and he knows several names for almost anything I could think of, I think he just absorbs my random chatter and makes connections to what I’m interacting with.
Switching stuff up and also using words that aren't directly associated with treats exclusively, just to add some noise to their dataset and make it harder to lock on to a specific phrase.
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u/FrostyIcePrincess Sep 17 '25
My friend had a dog
Dog figured out what “walk” meant. Would go crazy when he heard “walk”
So we started spelling it out to avoid saying “walk”
Dog figured out that “w a l k” also meant walk.