Resource Guarding Part 1

This article is about dogs resource guarding things against their owners, the topic of a dog resource guarding its owner from other dogs or family members is a different topic and will be dealt with in a separate article, cunningly titled Resource Guarding Part 2.

Resource guarding is a good old controversial topic full of nonsense and is talked about in pretty much every space anybody talks about dogs and owning dogs. There is also an enormous amount of weird and wacky suggestions for people to try and overcome the issue, and just as many on how to avoid the problem developing with puppies. I’ll delve into this in some more depth at the end, it’s not really necessary for you to read the vitriol I shall unleash at dog training, but it’s going to be fun writing it, so up to you.

As with most topics, I like to paint the picture of what’s going on with human examples, this aids clarity in people’s minds eye and because the causes of behaviour are the same for dogs and humans (It’s all mammals actually, but I’m writing about dogs…..)

Before I go launching into scenarios, I shall define some of the more common situations in which dogs resource guard against their owners or owners family;

Food, this is the number one thing. If your dog refuses to let you approach it when it has food, using a mixture of body language, growls and barks, and perhaps air snaps and lunges too, your dog is resource guarding the food from you. This obviously carries risks for situations when your dog may find something on the ground out on a walk that it shouldn’t eat, but it tries to anyway, and you’re faced with the situation that could get nasty if you try and take whatever it is out of your dog’s mouth. Here’s a reasonable photo of what it can look like;

Resource Guarding Food

The same applies to toys, and it can apply to specific places in the house.

Just before I go into the humanising scenarios I would like to point out that dogs are not humans and shouldn’t be treated as such, so humanising (anthropomorphising, to give it the technical term) has limitations, but I find nothing else brings as much clarity to understanding behaviour, that’s why I like it so much, and in this case it’s actually a 100% fit to the behavioural issue.

Imagine you are out to lunch / dinner with your spouse / friend / family. You’re all having a good time, enjoying your food, when a stranger approaches your table and attempts to take food off your plate. How do you react? Do you let them take the food? Do you intercept them before their hand makes it to your plate? Do you have anything to say? I’d say there’s a fair chance they don’t actually get any food off your plate, or if they do, there’s a commotion which results in them being ejected from the area. Well, if you did anything more than silently letting them take the food, you just engaged in resource guarding. Does that mean there’s something wrong with you? Do you need training?

Let’s alter that scenario a little and re-run it and see what happens; the same scenario as above, but your best friend is the person that approaches your table and grabs a bit of food off your plate. How do you react? I doubt you’ll be super happy, but I would bet large sums of money that you don’t react with any violence. The most likely reaction is you asking “what are you doing” or maybe an invitation to “put that back” or “do you mind”, perhaps in the case of men, something a little more expletive filled, but ultimately you aren’t going to get nasty, it’s your best friend.

A third iteration now; same scenario, but your spouse is the one who takes food off your plate. Do you even say anything? I’ll admit that I still raise an eyebrow at my wife if and when she does this, same with my children.

So why did you have different reactions in each scenario? The different reactions are because what is important is not the resource. What is important is the relationship you have with the person trying to take the resource; the person you’ve never met gets resource guarded. Your best friend gets a little light hearted verbal jab, its almost a free pass, and your spouse basically gets a free pass. The free pass is because your relationship is based on solid trust and respect and that includes access to resources, even the food on your plate.

So here’s the gut punch; if your dog resource guards things from you, the actual core issue is that your relationship with the dog has gone off kilter somewhere along the line, your dog does not value you or trust you as their best friend / partner and is therefore trying to deny you access to resources it considers to be of value.

I cannot stress this enough; resource guarding is not a training problem.

The solution is to find out why the relationship has gone wrong and to fix that. Once that’s been done and the relationship is on the correct footing, one of mutual trust and respect, the resource guarding disappears all on its own because real trust and leadership have been established in the relationship.

You, the reader, now know all you need to in order to fix resource guarding; fix your relationship with the dog. The next bit is me being unnecessary in unleashing my darker side at dog training.

I got sent a link to a trainer, who I’ll leave anonymous (it isn’t about this trainer specifically) who is trying to “train” food aggression out of a dog. This is sadly an industry accepted technique, and oddly enough it doesn’t really work, and is, in fact, a self -licking lollypop, and like all self-licking lollypops, it generates excellent repeat business for the trainer offering it as the dog has to keep coming back to be tortured punished / beaten corrected into submission.

The images are all screenshots, you can’t play them as videos!!!

I think the image above gives a fairly good explanation of what you can expect to happen in the next few paragraphs and images. Please note the fake or synthetic / prosthetic arm.

Here we have a dog in a slip leash. I already don’t like it. Slip leashes are nasty nasty tools.

The dog is eating from the food bowl. The bowl was filled with kibble. I don’t know how well the trainer does or does not know the dog. This was not made clear in the Instagram video.

Note the fake hand. The trainer is using it to stroke the dog whilst its eating. Why? Because humans have decided that being grumpy at being touched during eating your food is not allowed. Would you like me stroking you whilst you ate? Put yourself in that scenario a second and try not to pull a face at the sheer stupidity of it.

So now the dog has been dragged away from the food, for no other reason that the trainer can. Oh, and the dog really didn’t want to leave the food, but being strangled doesn’t really give the dog much of an option.

So now we have a stranger poking a dog that’s eating with a fake hand, and has then forcibly dragged the dog away from the food by strangling it until it gave in. What a way to make friends and build trust.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really struggling to see why this dog might have gotten a bit pissed off with this guy. I mean he’s done nothing at all that could possibly be in anyway irritating has he? You’d be literally begging to be his best friend at this point wouldn’t you?

Awww, look at that happy face on the dog, picture above. A smile for days. If that were me in the dog’s place, I imagine my facial expression would be something similar.

Next, picture below, comes the totally inexplicable and unexpected completely shocking turn of events when the dog says “Enough. Fuck this shit, and fuck you” and the trainer has to resort to lifting the dog up by the neck almost off the floor by the slip leash to prevent himself from getting mauled. It’s a sad sight at best, enraging at worst. Did I mention there’s no way to see this coming. None at all. Please adjust your sarcasm filter as required.

This is the point at which I could no longer contain myself and had to comment on the video. I’ll copy that exchange below. But first, just to show that the dog was eventually allowed the food, here’s proof. What a nice trainer.

This, ladies and gent’s, is how not to approach the problem. It’s worse than that. This is deliberately provoking a reaction from the dog in order to punish the resulting behaviour. If you know anything about punishment, you’ll know that punishment does not alter the intent of the punished animal to do the behaviour, it only temporarily supresses it until the punishing contingency, or threat of punishment is removed. That’s why this is a self-licking lollypop and the dog has to keep going back. This doesn’t change the intent of the dog. It can’t. Science tells us this. So as soon as the slip leash & this trainer are gone, guess what happens. It all comes back. Poor owner, they’ll take the brunt of it and be paying out again and again.

This dog is resource guarding food because it doesn’t have a relationship with the trainer that is based on anything approaching trust and respect. That is impossible whilst the use of a slip leash is employed. It’s also impossible when you deliberately drag a dog away from its food for no other reason than to provoke a reaction. It’s also impossible when you spend your time poking an eating dog with a fake hand, to get a reaction. Notice the theme in provoking a reaction.

This is setting up a dog to fail, and punishing it when it does. I have zero respect for people engaged in that kind of thing. Zero.

Here’s the comment exchange I left on the page. I stand by this; if you treated me the way this trainer treated this dog, my reaction would be identical. I would try and end this person, or any person strangling me to get me away from my food just because they could.

If you lifted me almost off the floor by my neck whilst strangling me because I reacted to your deliberate and unnecessary provocation there’d be a full on fight to the death. You’d need to be good with a slip leash to win against me, and I can bear a grudge for a long time - think about that ability to bear a grudge, do you think dogs easily forget being so badly disrespected and treated? I wouldn’t. I’d be waiting for my chance to get you back. You wouldn’t survive.

and my reply to that last comment, but first please notice how that last comment above completely omits any of the punishing tools used and suggests nothing more mean than a hand on the shoulder happened, painting a casual picture of nothing untoward going on. That is such a gross and disgusting downplaying of what is going on it genuinely shocked me. There is a dog being poked and strangled to provoke a reaction, then being strangled to the point of surrender or die going on in the video. These people are gross. So I replied:

As I have so eloquently stated before elsewhere, dog training needs to die in a ditch. It really does. It takes all my self-restraint to not include cerebral cretins like the people advocating for and carrying out this kind of abuse on dogs in the name of behaviour modification. It is nothing of the sort. It is abuse, plain and simple.

Resource guarding is a relationship issue, not a training issue. That is not a debatable statement.