What a Load of Tripe

Last summer when we had a couple of training sessions with dog trainer extraordinaire, Laurie, we worked mostly on preparing Ray for the addition of a baby in the house but at the end of one of the sessions, she asked if there was anything  else we wanted her  to work on.  Weeeellll, at seven months old, Ray still would not got down the stairs and at his weight it was getting to be more and more of an issue.  I had tried luring him down with treats on each stair, coaxing with a toy, etc., to no avail.  As she went out to her car and dug in the trunk, I wondered what she was going to bring us.  I was sure she was going to teach me some magical technique that I could work on with Ray.  Would we start at the landing and work our way up and down from there? 

She came  back with a can.  A can of some magical, disgusting, vile, green goo that she popped open and waved around above Ray's nose working  him up to an excited frenzy, she wafted the scent around his snout, gave him a small lick from the can and let him chase her up and down the stairs.  Up. and. down. the. stairs.  Twice.

photo from pet360.com





Green beef tripe is a magical, disgusting (did I mention magical) mess that seems to make Ray do anything you want him to do.  After that session, Ray never hesitated around stairs again.  From what I can tell, though, this horrible can of innards is only available by the case and really?  I don't want a case of green tripe.  Just having an opened can in the fridge was terrible enough.  Remembering that, however, I decided to look for some tripe in the form of treats.  I figured it was worth a shot to maybe find some tripe in handy treatable morsels to aid in training. 


At my last visit to Mr Chewy, I ordered some Tripe Treats by Petkind which I thought might do the trick.  I was hoping they were small enough to make into training treats and I was excited enough to not read too carefully.

(Photo from Amazon)

These are not small and they are not easily broken, so they are more of a "go to your mat" treat to settle rather than a small tidbit to reward with.  That's ok, because Ray loves his tripe and a bag of these should last well over a week if given once a day, which I doubt we'll do.  In the meantime, I'll keep looking for some smelly, bite-sized tripe, I guess.

Have you ever used tripe?  What kind of results did you achieve?