If you ask Google for tutorials about tugging and toy play for agility, you’ll get thousands of hits, and most of them will be quite relevant.
If you ask Google for tutorials about training agility with food, you’ll get … not a lot that’s relevant. A mix of dog food ads, and blog posts telling you that it’s really important to get your agility dog tugging and yes you can do it even if your dog is only interested in food.
Tug toys are great. I view them as the gold standard choice of reward for many agility training exercises. Virtually all of the top agility competitors, both in NZ and around the world, use tug toys for a lot of their training. This is why the content you’ll find online is so heavily skewed towards “So you want to do agility but your dog doesn’t like tugging? Here’s how you can invest hours of your life into getting him tugging!”.
But what if you don’t want to do that? What if you have limited time to train and want to make progress on “real agility” skills rather than tugging? What if you want to try agility training or competition, but you don’t have elite ambitions for your dog and you’d rather just use food? What if it’s your first agility dog and you don’t have the skills to teach your dog to enjoy tugging with only the guidance of a 15-minute video on YouTube?
