Resource Guarding Part 2

This second article about resource guarding concerns dogs resource guarding other people and other dogs from being near their owner. Part 1 dealt with the dog resource guarding things like food, spaces or toys from the owner.

The most common scenario in which I encounter the issue of dogs resource guarding their owner is in multi-dog homes. It’s not exclusively this arrangement, I have come across it in single dog homes too, but it seems to be something that occurs more readily in multi-dog homes, and of recent enquiries I’ve dealt with the issue comes to a head when a new dog is introduced to the home, though it never seems to be instantaneous, there’s often a few months delay until problems start to show up.

I won’t separate out single and multi dog homes any further; there is no reason to, the causes of, and solution to, the issue of resource guarding are the same for both scenarios, so it makes sense to join them together again.

One thing that needs to be made explicitly clear upfront is that territorial behaviour is not the same as resource guarding. There are many breeds out there with a very strong territorial instinct, which has been deliberately bred into them, so there is zero point in trying to fix that. Some clients might say that they think their dog is protecting them, and the presentation of such a thing would look very similar to both reactivity and resource guarding.

Its probably about time I defined resource guarding so that we are all on the same page;

Resource guarding the owner is a behavior where a dog acts defensively or aggressively (growling, snapping, biting, or nudging) to protect access to their owner, treating the human as a valuable, exclusive resource. It usually manifests when someone or another dog comes into the space of the owner. It should not be confused with reactivity, though in some situations it looks the same.

So what causes it?

I am not going to sugar coat this bit. The main driver is insecurity. Dogs that resource guard their owners from other people or dogs are sensing and reacting to something in the relationship with their owner that they perceive as insecure. That can be something momentary, like a mood change the dog detects in the owner, or, it can be something more long term and structural with the relationship such as the human not being viewed as the leader and so the dog fills that leadership vacuum and begins to control access to what is sees as its property, which is the owner.

The next obvious question is how does an owner fix the problem?

There are a lot of buzzwords or catchphrases in the industry associated with fixing this issue, the most common being “relationship reset”. This is both a necessary thing to do, but also a very nebulous statement that doesn’t mean a great deal as a two-word throw away saying on its own.

The fixing of this issue does come down to getting the relationship between the owner and dog from where it is, to where it needs to be, which is for the human to be in the role of leader and not the dog. This is where we need to step into the realm of psychology rather than behaviour. Stay with me on this for the next few paragraphs, we are going to go waaaayyyy out into leftfield for a few moments.

Telling people all they have to do to fix a problem is become a / the leader is a bit of a strange thing. People have been trying to define what is to be a leader as long as people have existed, and it seems relatively well understood that there are two paths to it. People are either born that way or shaped into it through life experiences. My favourite definition of leadership is from Chase Hughes: “Leadership is defined as the ability to generate "followership" through your behavior alone.” One point I’ll add just to be explicit. The definition of leadership specifically excludes the use of words and therefore commands.

Let me just say that I am not telling people they need to develop the leadership skills required to be the CEO of a multibillion dollar company. But what I am saying is that there is something about the way a person conducts themselves, or put another way, acts out what they believe, that defines them as a leader, or not a leader.

Head scratching moment for you: You don’t believe what you say you do. What you believe is what you act out every moment of every day. That runs through your micro actions all the way up to your grand strategy for life 30 years into the future, or not if you don’t think that far ahead, but that says something about what you believe about the future and its value to you today.

What you act out, which is both what you believe and how you conduct yourself, is therefore what sets out your stall, as it were, for people and your dog to judge whether to follow you or not. It is also the basis for attracting friends and partners, and perhaps surprisingly, the importance of the verbal content is minimal, much the same as person to person communication. The actual words constitute approximately 7 to 10% of meaning in communication. So it is with leadership.

I’ll put the above into plain English; if you don’t believe you are a leader, you won’t act like one. If you don’t act like one, you aren’t one. The most common mistake people make with leadership is they think it means to be in charge, be the person dishing out the orders. It is not. A leader is the person people choose to follow, choose to do things for because they want to, the person people look to when the chips are down - and that is all achieved almost entirely non-verbally.

So what on earth does all that have to do with a dog that is resource guarding its owner?

First and foremost it means you cannot use commands and control to solve the issue. No amount of sits, downs, stays, recalls etc etc are going to solve the issue. Neither are muzzles or e-collars because the problem is not the dog, nor the behaviour of the dog, that is the manifestation of the problem, call it a symptom if you prefer, and we are instead going after the cause, thus the solution does not lie in trying to control the moment of the guarding. Control is not leadership.

Let me put all this theory into something practical people can do to work through this issue because relationship resets are not easy.

The goal of all this is for the dog to change its perception of the owner from a resource that needs controlling, to the leader. This occurs through establishing a calm and respectful authority. The most obvious and easy win is (each and every time) the dog begins to resource guard the owner in the home environment, the owner should calmly remove themselves from the area where the dog is, go and do something else where the dog cannot reach with the person / dog that was being guarded. This is a direct consequence for the behaviour, a negative reinforcement to give it its technical term, and it puts the responsibility for change onto the dog, in flow chart terms;

Dog does X then Y is the consequence. The dog doesn’t like Y and wants it to stop, dog has to calculate how to make that happen, so dog changes behaviour. Note: You have also changed behaviour, you demonstrated calm leadership.

This is just one quick example - I’m not giving all my secrets away here. But it is all about how the person conducts themselves. They must not get angry or frustrated or shout at the dog or “correct” the dog. They just calmly do something which is a consequence the dog doesn’t want, which in my example, is to leave. There is no need to even speak. Leadership, remember.

Nobody follows or respects hot-heads who have loud emotional and angry outbursts when things don’t go their way, and no dog will trust someone that starts dishing out punishments for a behaviour who’s cause is not understood. We need to avoid behaving like this and avoid punishing the dog as that shows that we are not calm masters of our environments and scenarios, i.e. it shows we are not leaders able to remain calm when it matters most.

The owner who can reach calm mastery of all situations in which nothing flusters them; that is who dogs will choose to give their trust and the leadership position to, and it is a free choice, we can’t force them to. If you prefer, in the words of James French: When an animal finds peace in your presence they will come to trust you. When they trust you, you are on the right path towards leadership and when that is where you are headed, the resource guarding will start disappearing on its own.

That’s the funny thing about behaviours, the solution to them is never direct, they are purely a symptom of the problem, and in almost all cases, the problem is the relationship with the human.