There's a big difference between using treats as reward, as opposed to treats as bribery. Treats as a reward is giving the horse a treat AFTER he has performed what you have asked of him to a satisfactory level, where he does not know there is a treat available and he has performed what you have asked out of good training.
Bribery is using a treat to tempt a horse into something. In my opinion, that is NOT training unless you combine it with gradually decresing the treats until the horse will perform the action on your aids not in desire of a piece of food.
A good example is one which I have used in another thread which brought up the issue of bribery/"training", with treats. "Training" a horse to enter a float by bribing him in with food. The vast majority of horses I have seen "trained" with this method that started out as horses that would not set foot in the float, ended up being horses that would run up the ramp, stretch out, grab a mouthfull of food and run backwards. Eat the food, go back up again etc. Eventually the horse would get sick of running up and down, so would stay in the float. Owners would quickly shut up the ramp and off they go on their merry way.
Then they get where they're going and say 'hey, we forgot to bring treats.....oh well he's "trained" to load now'. So of course, he point blank refuses to enter the float again until some sort of food bribery is offered.
Please explain to me how this is training? There is no discomfort for the horse to be outside of the float, I don't understand how this would work?
I have trained a good 15 horses now to load, each of them had varying issues with loading. Each one I worked in basically the same way. Pressure/discomfort outside of the float created by tapping them continuously on the hindquarters with a dressage whip, and as soon as a step towards the float is taken, then pressure comes off. Ask with forward pressure on the halter, horse doesn't move forward, he gets the pressure again. Took me maybe 20mins to get the worst one to load with no dramas. The horses that I'm still hearing about, will all load now without a drama, rope over the neck and walk straight up. They don't run out when you open the back as they know if they do, it's going to be uncomfortable.
To me pressure/release is the way horses learn, not using bribery.