Dictionaries say that palatability means: appetizing, savory, tasty, – agreeable or pleasant especially to the sense of taste.
Other dog articles suggest that palatability is crucial to making a great dog training treat. That kind of makes sense, that a dog must really enjoy EATING a dog treat, for it to want to repeat a behaviour. And that is particularly true of a dominant dog, or a hunting dog, that is programmed NOT to have to take direction from an owner.
But that is a very big caveat to all of this.
A dog’s sense of SMELL is much stronger and important to its understanding of what is going to be enjoyable, than its taste buds. That is, while a dogs sense of smell is made up of a much better sense organ in its nose, and much larger part of the brain decoding what that sense tells it- a combined equivalent of 10 -20 thousand times that of what a human experiences, the sense of taste is comparatively dumbed down compared to us.
That is, a dog’s number of taste buds are around one sixth what humans have.
Given this information, you can readily see why the ODOUR of the treat should be, and is, far more important to a dog’s desirability for a treat, than what the actual treat tastes like.
This should make sense to you, when you understand how our own sense of smell and taste combine to tell us how good something is to eat. When we have a cold, and our sense of smell is very diminished, we often can hardly taste most foods, let alone be able to differentiate between low quality and high-quality foods and tastes.
So, contrary to many other articles you have read, palatability, in so much as the specific taste a treat provides to a dog, is only a small part of the eqution of what it perceives the treat reward to be.
That is, a strong smelling high quality treat, a natural training specialised foods if you will, with low taste will be a low odour treat, with strong taste, every time. And not only that, if your dog is fussy, unless the smell really entices them they might not even try the dog training treat in the first place – unless it has a powerful amazing SMELL.
Understanding SMELL AND Palatability in Dog Training Treats:
The purpose of the dog training treat is that it is a rare (seldom given) positive reward, that they take about 2-3 seconds to eat (so they remember why they did the action.
A high reward treat thus needs to be something rarely given, of the right size and shape and hardness (so that they take the required time to chew it and think about their actions) – but none of this will happen, unless that treat smells exceptionally good, and at least tastes ok.
Given that the dogs sense of smell is much higher than a humans, and its taste much lower than a humans, it is of course a combination of sense of smell and taste, but that is much more weighted towards the treat SMELLING great.
Palatability (taste) is mostly connected to flavour (the triggering of certain taste buds mostly on the top of the tongue), and texture.
Why natural dog treats and texture are important in dog training treats
Texture is akin to mouth feel. Once a dog has accepted that the smell is good enough to eat the treat, they will then chomp on it. If the size is right, and the hardness ok, not too soft so that its eaten very quickly without chewing, and not too hard, so it takes a long time to eat and they get caught up in the chewing rather than remembering that they are being rewarded.
Then texture comes into play.
Many dog treats are grain or vegetable based. If they have a high meat content or offal, you are well on the way to providing a nutritious treat, but only half way towards satisfying a primal urge.
Plant based treats (over 50% grain or vegetable matter) usually have highly ground flour and MDM meat shredded into small pieces. It is then essentially glued together, but that is a similar texture to dog food kibble.
If your dog eats any kibble as part of a regular commercial dog food diet then they will probably be over that texture. Or in the least it will associate what is supposed to be an amazing rare treat with regular old dog food.
Whereas if you can get or cut down 100% single ingredients like fish or beef or kangaroo jerky, that will have a graining fibre, a genuine primal texture that your dog will be fascinated with. It will spur chewing and saliva and increase endorphins and pleasure- the key to a high reward training treat.
This is also why people use 100% single ingredient livers, like beef, chicken or kangaroo. Why waste an opportunity to get something of higher nutrition value into your dog as we as providing it with an exceptional dog training treat?
It is true that liver is usually ground down, but rather than being stuck together (grain and mdm meat into a ball) liver is usually a syrupy consistency with slight bumps in it. When it dries it will have ridges because of those bumps or the tray that it was dried on. The trays are used to increase surface area and quicken drying, as well as enable scoring marks for easily breaking it into smaller pieces for training.
Whatever dog training treat you use, make sure it’s the most special one you can find, or at least that your dog thinks is special, and use it only for training.
