Leave It (Out of Your Training Plan)

Why “Leave It” isn’t part of an optimal dog training program

By Sarah Shapiro-Ward May 2026

Introduction

At The Dog School, we don’t teach “Leave It” as part of the regular curriculum. This usually surprises and worries people in equal measure because without “Leave It”, people seem certain that their dog will run amok. But what if I told you that thinking this way is a result of people anthropomorphising dogs?  “Leave It” is by far the least functional cue still prevalent in dog training curricula today because it is a result of humans thinking like humans, rather than humans thinking like dog trainers. Maybe you think I’ve finally lost the plot, but hear me out. I think you’ll come around.

How Other Trainers Teach “Leave It”

Before we start, let’s evaluate the current state of “Leave It” training in the dog community at large. There are three popular versions of “Leave It” taught routinely by professional trainers which are as follows:

1. “Leave It” as an “Or Else” cue

2. “Leave It” as an attention cue

3. “Leave It” as captured food avoidance

Method One: Leave it as an “Or Else” cue

Back in the bad old days before Skinner and Karen Pyror popularized positive reinforcement training, dog trainers used a heavier hand to suppress behaviours. In the case when your main tool is aversive pressure (e.g. leash corrections, e-collars or spray bottles), a “Leave it” cue is actually quite humane. In this case, the cue means “stop doing what you’re doing or else I will apply a punishment”. It gives the dog an out, and allows them to avoid unpleasant consequences so long as they cease whatever activity they were doing. Over time, the dog even stops engaging in activities which get flagged with the “Leave It” cue, because they just aren’t worth the effort or risk of punishment. From a learning theory perspective, this system is effective and logically sound, but old-fashioned. The modern dog training world has largely moved on from punishment, though there are many who still teach this way.

Method Two: Leave it as an attention cue

The idea here is to teach the dog that when the “Leave It” cue is said, it means they should re-orient towards the handler for a treat. You can train this quite easily by setting out a minor distraction, cueing “Leave It”, then marking and reinforcing when your dog turns around to face you. As you progress, you can use more interesting distractions in new locations and at closer distances. 

This is the method I taught for years, and I noticed two things about it. Thing number one: this is exactly how we teach Name Attention or any other attention cue. If you’ve taught your dog to look at you when you say their name (or “watch me”) then you’re effectively teaching the same behaviour on two different cues, except generally people put more effort into distraction proofing the “Leave It” version, and less effort into distraction proofing the name attention version. I noticed this in the curriculum of the old dog training school I used to work at, and when I asked about it, my old mentor gave me a very interesting answer: Pet parents want an attention cue and a “Leave It” cue. It doesn’t matter that these are the same, so long as people have the cues on-board that they want. Give the people what they want! Why not, if it works? It’s just that… does it really work? Katrina and I both believe in teaching our students first principles and training theory—not rote protocols that they should blindly trust, and this is why. By using two cues for the same behaviour, we split our training efforts. Even at its most benign, this training curriculum simply takes longer than if we were to just build up one very strong multi-functional attention cue which also happens to work in leave-it scenarios.

The second thing I noticed was more important, and it was that dogs would begin to get “sneaky” about the “Leave It” cue, while being pretty normal about the name attention cue. An example of this is one dog I trained who was a big fan of eating goose-poop. They’d come to my old classes and had “Leave It” as an attention cue, and had diligently practiced around goose poop with a lot of success. The problem happened when the handler was distracted—it was very clear to me that the dog saw goose poop ahead on the path and bided their time carefully, waiting until the handler wasn’t looking, and they had enough leash slack to dart forward and grab it successfully. It felt like the “Leave It” cue had made this dog sneakier and more calculating around goose poop, not less interested!

When “Leave It” is taught like an attention cue only around highly distracting stimuli, “Leave It” actually tells your dog that there’s something fun in the environment which might be accessible if you’re quick enough. For some dogs who have learned this way, you can say “Leave It!” and the dog will actually start looking for the contraband, so that they can weigh up their next move—is it worth trying to snatch? Or should I choose the treat? On the flip side, illicit items are fair-game if your person isn’t paying close enough attention to tell you to “Leave It”. After all, sneaky behaviour gets the prize, so sneakiness is reinforced. Now, not all dogs will wisen up to this interpretation of the “Leave It” cue, especially if your timing, management and training mechanics are good. Unfortunately, the dog/handler teams who need a “Leave It” cue the most tend to be the most likely to progress towards this kind of mayhem, due to a combination of poor handler situational awareness coupled with an opportunistic dog. Under these conditions, “Leave It” as an attention cue was actively failing its target audience (even if it was working just fine for everybody else).

Method Three: Captured Food Avoidance AKA the “It’s Yer Choice Game”

Susan Garrett is one of the best modern dog trainers in North America, so when you see a training game with her name on it, it’s usually a great idea. “It’s Yer Choice” is one of Susan’s most popular training games, but straight up my least favourite. When used fairly, with the right dog and in combination with many other training games, “It’s Yer Choice” can work very well. Unlike the attention cue, this game works by capturing the dog’s behaviour off-cue, so the context itself serves to inform the dog’s behaviour. To train this game, simply present food to your dog which they cannot access (for example, in your hand which you can close if the dog tries to take the treat). When your dog gives up and backs off the food, mark and reinforce. Remarkably quickly, the dog will start choosing to avoid the presented food, without having to be cued by the handler. This avoids the problem of the attention cue, where the absence of the leave it cue may as well be permission to take it. This game is effective and powerful, and marketed as “positive reinforcement”. So what’s the problem?

This game appears very benign and effective, which makes it popular amongst newer pet parents. The trouble is that when used on the wrong dog or without the right balance of other games, this training game can have devastating fallout effects. The very audience it appeals to most (new puppy parents) are the least equipped to understand the downsides to this game, and so end up breaking their dog’s food drive and subsequent training for weeks, months or even years to follow. Most dogs can handle “It’s Yer Choice” without falling apart, but for the dog’s who can’t, boy do they really wind up in some weird places.

Capturing as a training method is a tricky beast. The human trainer might think they are marking and reinforcing for the dog backing off the food, but not doing something is not a clickable behaviour—you can only capture intentional behaviours on the dog’s part. Instead of “Don’t Eat That” you are really clicking for a sit, a step back, a stay or a look away. Once in a while in Rally-O class, we will be working on heel past a bowl of food and the student’s dog will sit and stare at the food bowl. This is one of the milder fall-outs for this game, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s common. It’s a case of accidentally training the dog to do a behaviour (“sit when you see food”), and then being confused or upset when the dog does the thing (sits and stares at the food bowl in rally class, instead of heeling past it). This one is an easy fix, we simply re-build the heeling behaviour in the context of the distraction, until the dog no longer offers the old sitting behaviour.

Less common, but more difficult, is the way this game can destroy food drive in lower food-drive or under-confident dogs. The frustration that occurs at the beginning of this game (when the dog is trying and failing to get the food) can create a conditioned emotional response or lack of confidence in low-drive or timid dogs which can quite literally put them off their training treats. Handlers then have to look for fancier training treats and start cheering their dogs on to eat food, which can be the start of a slippery slope towards fussy eating. Underconfident dogs who learn food avoidance early on can lose one of the big confidence-building tools in our toolbelt (foraging for food in the environment). The reason this happens is that capturing food avoidance doesn’t just leverage positive reinforcement to work, it also leverages negative punishment. In the “It’s Yer Choice” game, food is presented to the dog and then taken away as a consequence of performing any foraging behaviour. Taking away a good thing to punish an unwanted behaviour is called negative punishment. Adding a treat at the end allows us to dress this game up as positive reinforcement, without the players ever realising they are utilising punishment as the critical contingency. It’s great marketing, but sensitive dogs lose out.

My least favourite, but thankfully least common, fall out from this game is dogs who straight up refuse to follow a food-lure because they believe it’s part of the food avoidance game. I had a little dog come to tricks class last year who had done lots of “It’s Yer Choice”. When I tried to use a food lure to teach this dog “spin”, he sat proudly by his chair and wouldn’t budge. For this dog, becoming so proficient in “It’s Yer Choice” actually led to the dog losing the ability to eat food from our hands. We had to slowly and carefully rebuild this dog’s ability to eat food from our hands, from the floor, and as a food-lure.

Fans of “It’s Yer Choice” will defend this training game by saying that it was never intended to be used in this way, or on sensitive dogs (and it’s not). They’ll tell you that any game when taken out of context or used in the wrong circumstances can cause harm, which is true. It’s a moot point, though, since there’s no compelling reason to teach any version of “Leave It”.

No “Leave It”, no problem

At The Dog School, we don’t teach “Leave It” in our curriculum. Instead, we have a large number of “impulse control” games scattered throughout the Puppy Program, Key Skills and Badge class curricula. We teach a strong multi-functional name attention cue to get the dog to orient to the handler, which we proof towards as many distractions as possible (food on the floor, distracting dogs and people). We also teach our version of “Zen Bowl” (popularised by Hannah Brannigan) which teaches dogs to perform a behaviour (including recall away from food, or walk past food, or walk past other dogs!) in order to be released to food in a bowl. We don’t use negative punishment to teach “Zen Bowl”; if your dog keeps scooping up free treats from the bowl we teach you how to set the environment up better next time, which will improve handling skills and situational awareness. Zen bowl gets your dog working around food on the floor distractions in a really positive way, making it excellent for all dogs including our shy or low-food drive friends. In Key Skills, we teach you how to transfer skills to context cues from the environment. In Key Skills:Send, our “send to mat” skill is used for the context of eating food at the table. 

Let’s look at some specific scenarios. A smart dog trainer always asks “what is the scenario, what behaviour do I want, and what is my reinforcement strategy?”. Here are some examples which we use at The Dog School routinely.

Scenario One, Street Garbage

Antecedent environment: the alley behind my house where the trashcans are. The crows and raccoons sometimes spread trash around and my dog likes to eat it.

Behaviour I want: Focused loose leash walking (dog close to me, focused on me)

Reinforcement Strategy: Mark and reinforce the dog when they maintain position close to my side. High rate of reinforcement may be required to move through the alley without sniffing/foraging 

Scenario Two, Food on the Table

Antecedent environment: I put my sandwich on the coffee table.

Behaviour I want: Dog goes to their spot across the room

Reinforcement strategy: When I put my sandwich on the table, I toss a treat on the bed across the room. The dog eats the treat from the bed. Over time, I train my dog to go to their bed and stay there by adding duration between treat tosses as I am eating food.

Scenario Three, My Dog has a Sock

Antecedent environment: I left laundry out and my dog is running around with a sock

Behaviour I want: Drop It

Reinforcement Strategy: I say “Drop It” and give my dog a treat. My dog learns to drop socks. In future, I won’t leave my socks out, because I know that my dog may learn to pick up sock for treats if this keeps happening.

Scenario Four, My Dog is Staring

Antecedent environment: When out for a walk, my dog spotted another dog and is staring at them. I don’t want them to say hello.

Behaviour I want: Recall and/or Loose Leash Walking

Reinforcement Strategy: I call my dog’s name, they come back and I feed them a treat. Or, I cue my dog “Let’s Go” and my dog follows me a few paces away from the dog. I mark and feed. I then cue “Let’s Go” and walk away from the dog, or past them if needed.

“Leave It” as a cue is actually unnecessary in all of the above scenarios. By choosing a more appropriate behaviour and proofing it to common distractions, we can navigate the world quite well without ever needing a dedicated “Leave It” cue. It’s also wise to manage your antecedent environment to prevent unwanted behaviours—for example, avoiding leaving socks out, or walking down a trash filled alleyway (at least until you have a solid focused loose leash walk cue). When we actually look at the training parameters of common “Leave It” type situations, we see that there is always a more appropriate training solution. 

At first glance, you might think taking away the “Leave It” cue leaves a gaping hole in our curriculum, but if you look closer, you’ll see a thoughtful, multi-pronged approach where impulse control is layered into all of our work. “Leave It” is simply superfluous as a result.

Leave it: Let’s reflect

Back to what I said right at the beginning about anthropomorphising dogs. Why do we feel like we “need” a “Leave It” cue? I think it’s because we, the humans, want a system of rules and a way to apply that system of rules to our dogs. We don’t actually care about what the dog actually does when they hear “leave it” so long as they cease current behaviour. It stands to reason that it’s more important to us to stop behaviours, rather than start new better behaviours. We are adamant that we want the dog to understand that some things (according to our arbitrary human rules) are off limits to dogs. It’s VERY important (for humans) to make sure the dog knows this, and as a result we want to show them all of the contraband items so that they can understand “don’t eat this”. This very human way of thinking leads us to the absurd scenario where we start wheeling out illegal items like goose poop, pizza crusts, and chicken bones to show our dog “look at this, see this? ARE YOU LOOKING AT IT? GOOD! DON’T EAT IT”. 

As fun as it is to parade novel distractions in front of our dogs, this isn’t actually how a smart dog trainer would approach the problem. This is how humans have passed on information orally from generation to generation about which berries are poisonous, and which rivers not to swim in. It’s very sweet that we want to keep our dogs safe like this, but they just aren’t programmed to understand this very human way of sharing knowledge about danger. 

It’s my belief that humans want a “Leave It” cue because they think it gives them control over their dog in high-pressure scenarios. What people really want when they shout “Leave It” is a guarantee that their dog will stop putting themselves (or us) in danger by understanding the gravity of the situation. This protects us from mistakes, or unforeseen circumstances. This is also very human of us, and I love that we care so much. Unfortunately, Leave-It cues aren’t a safety guarantee, and if the scenario is set-up unfavourably, even a well-trained “Leave It” cue can fail. The most comprehensive safety guarantee is physical management (e.g. a muzzle, a leash, a long-line, a fence). The rest comes down to sensible risk-mitigation strategies and preparation through robust proofing of normal training cues (recall, focused loose leash walking, name attention, drop it and send to spot). 

Conclusion

I wonder if you still think I’m nuts, or if I’ve convinced you that “Leave It” is simply a mass-delusion experienced by dog trainers. Either way, I hope this blog makes you think critically. It’s important to question why training works, as well as how to do it. By understanding the first principles behind training theory, you can understand your dog better and be closer to them as a result. Dog training is an unregulated field largely built upon a corpus of lived experience with dogs. As a result, it’s a bit wibbly-wobbly-woo, and nothing should be taken as hard truth. In recent times it has become more important than ever to have critical thinking skills when faced with information from untested sources. I hope that my ruthless assassination of the “Leave It” cue demonstrates this, if nothing else.