Training is always an ongoing thing with Itzl, often initiated by himself. It wasn't always that way. Like all young vritters, he had his good days and his bad days while he was being trained.
We learned early on that he is not ruled by his tummy. Edible rewards were not going to work on him, and using food as a reward was actually counter-productive, because then he wouldn't eat. He would snub his dinner dish because he far too quickly associated "food" with "work" and if he didn't want to work, he wouldn't eat.
Toys worked for a while.
This toy was his all time favorite, and he associated it with play and fun, and that's how we transitioned "work" into "play", and he started eating regularly again. Toys worked for a long time and got us through the early stages of his training. Even today, he sees his job as playing, as a fun part of his day, and you can see his eyes light up when he gets to alert. "The game's on!"
His stand down command, the one i give to tell him I saw his alert and identified the source, is a signal to him for a moment of play and for praise and cuddles.
Just look at that face. He's expecting me to stop working and play with him because he alerted and I gave the stand down command.
He got so that even when he was having fun, he'd pause to alert. Here he is, paused in the snow to alert on a sound. It was someone's car alarm going off when a load of snow fell on it. Took a while to identify the source of the sound and dismiss it since it was a neighbor's car and he had to practically lead me to the car before I realized what was going on. After that, he learned that car alarms weren't like fire alarms, smoke alarms, and sirens where I needed to know immediately and deal with it right that second. Car alarms were like light sabers - fun but ultimately unimportant.
He learned his lessons on door alerts very well, and I have way too many pictures of him alerting at various doors, so I'll just put up one.
Once he learned the different types of essential alerts, and learned to diffierentiate between NOW alerts and Hurry Up alerts, and Fun alerts, he got to graduate:
Graduation wasn't the end of his lessons, though. There are always new sounds in our world that he needs to tell me about, so there's always a new lesson. His rewards for alerts now are cuddles and praise. he's not interested (not often, anyway) in playing after an alert, but he very much wants his praise and cuddles.