A place easily accessible, like a pocket or bait bag and reward the dog AFTER they have successfully followed your hand to the desired position. As soon as the dog catches onto the idea of following your hand, you keep the food elsewhere. Properly means you ONLY use it as a lure for a few repetitions. Sounds familiar huh? Learning to use any of our dog training tools properly is pretty much the key to success! The key to using food in your training is learning to use it properly. You can use your dog's sense of smell and desire for something yummy to teach the behavior of simple changes of body position, like Sit, Stand and Down fairly quickly and once the dog catches on to the cues, you can marry that understanding to the prompt from the e-collar, so you can then later build desired reliability. The scent of something interesting leads that hounds body through all sorts of changes, walking along a path, then crawling under a low fence line, then stretching on hind legs to see what is up the tree. If you think of a Hound, this picture is pretty vivid. The animal's body follows where the nose goes. The idea behind Lure and Reward is very simple. One of the easiest ways for the average person to teach a dog the meaning of a verbal cue is through lure and reward training.

It is our job to show them what we desire. They don't comprehend our words and can't read our minds as to what it is we want.

We have to remember that when we first start out teaching our dogs something, they have NO idea what it is that we are asking of them. That is my answer to the question of using food in training.

Gun dog hand signals