Resource Guarding
What are you communicating to your dog?
☁️ Picture this: You’re 6 years old, and finally after being so well behaved you get the final star on your star chart and receive your reward your parents have promised – a packet of m&m’s! So there you are sitting in your world of bliss, munching away at your prized chocolate. Suddenly your parents come over, take the m&m’s off you, take one out of the packet without asking, and hand the packet back. You’re a little bit frustrated but it’s the first time… So you get on with it… Back in your world of bliss.
Again, they start to approach and you start to get a little bit unsure… Last time they took an m&m! Low and behold they grab the packet, take another two and hand it back. This continues and after some time whenever they’re approaching you’re getting pretty fed up. You’ve just built a negative association with people approaching you with m&m’s and potentially anything you deem as yummy and valuable, as in the past this has meant they get taken off you and eaten and if you tried to verbalise your dislike you’d get yelled at and it all became a bit of a frustrating scenario.
At some point down the line your sibling comes over while you’re munching away at your m&m’s and you snap, you just want to eat them in peace!
❓ So what’s my point?
Think of what we are communicating to our dogs and puppies.
Resource guarding can be easily prevented from the beginning.
✅ Set up sessions while your puppy is eating, adding more food (the m&m’s) to their food bowl. You’re conditioning their emotional response of you approaching in that scenario into a positive one. They love when you come near the food bowl, it means more and more great things are coming! Growling is our dogs communication that they aren’t happy with something that is happening, and their bites are often when those are ignored.
If we build up our puppies history of good experience with people coming near their resources, when your next door neighbours toddler comes over and picks up the dogs bone while it’s eating, you’re going to have a dog that wags it’s tail - in the past their food + people approaching has meant great things!