Rehabilitating a Food Thief: Part 1 – Poppy's Problem

The other day I got an email from my friend Jane, a dedicated volunteer with the Cahor animal refuge in France. She shared with me the story of Poppy, a young Pointer / Weimaraner cross who had recently given birth to eight beautiful puppies and, lucky for her puppies, had been fostered out to a very generous care-giver.

Poppy's pups (photo: dog::links)

Despite being a gentle, trusting and extremely affectionate dog who enjoys the company of people to the point where she readily allows them to handle her pups, Poppy came into care with little training and a pathological need - she likes to steal food. When she was found, the heavily pregnant Poppy was starving. It is likely she had been abandoned, probably due to her pregnancy, and was thus forced to fend for herself, something domesticated dogs are just not equipped to do. Perhaps Poppy had a fondness for helping herself before her ordeal, perhaps not, it is impossible to say. What would be fair to assume though, is that Poppy’s starvation and the subsequent fear of not having enough to eat have resulted in her becoming a notorious food thief.

Poppy (photo: dog::links)

Stealing food is a common behavior in many dogs, not just those who have been forced to fend for themselves; food after all is a basic requirement to survival and if it is not readily available most dogs will resort to stealing to meet their nutritional needs. In Poppy’s case it might be simply that she has a propensity to make the most of an opportunity, or there could be more to it than a basic need for food. The trauma of being abandoned, coping with the physiological changes that accompany pregnancy, and that perpetual state of being hungry may have triggered in Poppy a psychological need to steal food. This behavior can easily be further reinforced because of the attention that Poppy gets, albeit negative, should her humans shoo her away from the food, or punish her for stealing it.

If any combination of these factors is in play, then Poppy’s condition will not be addressed just by giving her plenty of food to eat. If you look at it from her point of view, Poppy has likely learned through her ordeal that the only way to guarantee she will get a meal is to take whatever she can find. Perhaps in the past she had been regularly fed and food just miraculously and reliably appeared as it does for most pet dogs or perhaps she only received meager rations from her previous owners. Regardless of her past life, when Poppy was left to her own devices any previous supply line was severed - food was no longer on offer - and Poppy would have needed to revert to whatever means possible to stay alive.

Just because food starts to appear out of nowhere once more, doesn’t mean it will last forever and Poppy’s natural instincts will tell her to take whatever she can find, whenever she can. If, when this happens, a great fuss breaks out and she is chased away from the food, this just reinforces her initial desire to steal, perhaps making the item to be stolen much higher in value than she previously thought because there is competition for obtaining it.

The table below shows one way of describing the existing behavior :

Describe existing behavior: steals food, runs away to eat it in seclusion
Opportunities	Dog loose, food readily available: laid out on the table, on the kitchen bench, in shopping bags on the floor, in the cat's bowl
Cues (triggers)	Sight or smell of food; attention of humans
Reinforcers	The physiological satisfaction that comes from eating the food, attention from humans, yelling, commotion, running, game of “get away”

Another way to look at the situation is as part of a behavior chain in which the stealing is continually being reinforced.

Behavior Chain format adapted from Karen Pryor Academy Dog Training Program

We see this happening frequently enough with humans that it should be no surprise when it also happens with dogs. People steal for the same reasons: the desire for what they don’t have is greater than any consequences that might occur for the action, and always worth the risk when faced with the option of doing without. In fact, many thieves steal for the attention it attracts to them, they like the notoriety that accompanies their actions.

So does this mean that rehabilitating a food thief is futile? Luckily for Poppy and other dogs like her, no.

Through a dedicated and consistently positive approach using operant conditioning with high levels of reinforcement, Poppy can be taught to respond to food in a different way and to look to her new owner as the source of all things good in her life. This is an ideal situation for using a clicker or a similar marker to indicate to the dog when she is displaying appropriate behavior and to reward her with a high value treat.

In my next blog on this topic, I will detail one way in which Poppy and other dogs who steal food can be conditioned to leave food alone and instead make the sight of such food a cue to do something else entirely.