Understand Resource Guarding

Dogs guard resources because they fear losing them. This is a natural behavior in many animals and can been seen in toddler playgroups too. 

Sometimes the fear is learned through experience; someone has been taking valuable resources away from the dog.  Many humans seem to think they have an absolute right to take anything away from their dogs at anytime, and their dogs should let them, without protest. That’s a great way to create a resource-guarding behavior. 

Other dogs start resource guarding from a very early age, even absent known encounters with rude, resource-grabbing humans. There is a genetic element to this and resource guarding is more common amongst certain breeds e.g. Golden Retrievers. 

Approach

Either way, our goal is to convince dogs that a human approaching them when they are in possession of a resource is not a threat to their resource, but rather, predicts the arrival of more good things. We want to set up training scenarios to teach them this.

Start with low value items (treat or toys) and every time we approach them is to give them something better. 

Teach new behaviours

We can also teach the behaviours “Take it” and “Drop it/Give” via shaping.

Management

There are certain high value toys that will trigger the guarding instinct in higher intensity e.g. squeekies, . There are also low and mid value toys that will create less intense resource guarding behavior. Your choice of toy for your dog will have a big impact on the behavior.

Change the reward to you rather than the toy 

The toy is not alive and dogs will get bored of a static toy after a while. If you have 2 or more toys that are identical, you can make the one that you have higher value. Over time, your dog will associate the value in you rather than the toy.