I’d like to share a little dog trainer’s secret with pet owners. Actually we have lots of them. And actually, they aren’t secrets at all.
I’m not positive who came up with this, but I think it was Bob Bailey, an incredibly well-regarded animal trainer (I mean, REALLY highly regarded. He learned from and worked with the best - his wife, Dr Marian Breland Bailey, was a student of BF Skinner and a phenomenal trainer in her own right).

The idea is to pay the treat where you’d like the dog to be physically in the world. The concept here is, as Bob says, “simple but not easy.” I’ll provide just a few easy examples here.

I often get asked to help dogs learn to stop pulling while on leash. There are a lot of valid ways to teach this. One simple thing I try initially is to simply feed the dog a yummy treat every time she looks my way. She might be ahead of me near the end of her leash, but if she glances back at me, I say an enthusiastic “Yes” (which the dog has already learned predicts a treat is coming). But here’s the important part: I don’t feed her the treat while she’s walking or standing in front of me. I hold the treat near my left side and she comes there to get it. After some practice, I might even start luring her into a position facing forward next to me to get the treat.
(I may have to slowly convince her to collect at the right place at my side by slowly moving the treat closer to the right position over several repetitions.) But let me be clear: she’s still getting the treat for looking at me. I’ve added a short video below that shows the results of this with a young male pup named Magic.

What do you think happens? Frequently (though surely not always), we find the dog will just start hanging out near my side. I’m not requiring it - but I’m making that the rewarding place to be! Dogs will often develop a bias to the place they get the reinforcement.

One more example: Paying for position can be helpful while teaching a dog to stand from a down position. We often start out luring dogs into a standing position with a treat. But if we aren’t careful, we can accidentally teach the dog to stand and take a few (or several) steps forward. That’s probably not the end of the world in most cases. But if we want a dog to stand up and wait right there for their next instruction, we can teach that with careful position feeding. If we feed the dog as soon as he’s stood up, but before he starts walking, he’ll learn that that’s what he’s being paid for. If we don’t come close quickly enough, he might learn that he’s supposed to stand and move forward a few steps to collect the treat.

It’s easy for us to accidentally train things like that - I accidentally taught a dog to lie down AND put his chin on the ground when all I really wanted was the down. It’s no big deal most of the time and it was even very cute in that case.

But if we want to get better as trainers - whether professionals or pet owners training our dogs, paying for position will really help our dogs understand what we are trying to teach them. And our goal should be to make it easy for our dogs to learn. Pay them where you want them to be and/or where you want them headed next.

p.s. I think it was my friend, and agility dog trainer, Vici Whisner who first mentioned position feeding to me. It made sense then. But with practice, I’ve come to really see the value.

Magic developed a bias toward walking next to my left leg (essentially heeling) even though I never required it. But I did pay there every time he glanced at me while walking. In short order, he was hanging out next to me because that was a great place to be.

Feed for Position