Resource Guarding

[hoover]

Gosh that sounds really hard.  I guess you've got to try to avoid anything that would cause him to think that the guarding behaviour is working for him and try to keep all the trials you do 'sub-threshold'.  If you walk towards the bowl, he growls and then you give him treats, and which he eats and growls as you walk away, then you are inadvertently rewarding the growling: his first growl, in his mind, has had the positive effect of resulting in treats, and his second growl, in his mind, has had the positive result of getting you to go away and removing the threat to his food.

If he is growling at all, he is above his guarding threshold and I think you are best off aborting the trial altogether - certainly do not give him treats.  I think this can be the difficulty with this sort of training, it is so easy to inadvertently make things worse.  We certainly had similar difficulties working with Ollie and whilst we do have the Mine book and practice its advice when we know he is likely to guard we don't go out of our way to deliberately test him.

[tenaille]

yes, I think you can only modify his behaviour while he is below his threshold. Once he starts growling I doubt he is going to learn anything other than growling works, and when it doesn't work he may escalate to a bite. I would definitely be looking for professional advice while he is still young and before the behaviour becomes too entrenched.

[Archie bean]

It really sounds to me as though you need to get in some expert advice in the form of a behaviourist. At the moment he sounds very unsettled. Feeding time is clearly quite a stressful time for him so for the moment I personally wouldn't be trying to do anything without expert guidance for fear of inadvertently making the behaviour escalate.

[paulmlpss]

Thanks for all your replies. Does anyone know anybody who can help in West Midlands area? I want someone who knows what to do with the problems I've got with Ben. 

[paulmlpss]

It really sounds to me as though you need to get in some expert advice in the form of a behaviourist. At the moment he sounds very unsettled. Feeding time is clearly quite a stressful time for him so for the moment I personally wouldn't be trying to do anything without expert guidance for fear of inadvertently making the behaviour escalate.

How is archie now? I did manage to find your one thread saying you was having trouble with him?

[Archie bean]

It really sounds to me as though you need to get in some expert advice in the form of a behaviourist. At the moment he sounds very unsettled. Feeding time is clearly quite a stressful time for him so for the moment I personally wouldn't be trying to do anything without expert guidance for fear of inadvertently making the behaviour escalate.

How is archie now? I did manage to find your one thread saying you was having trouble with him?

He is brilliant. We rarely have any guarding issues now. He is just a big, silly cuddle monster! I never thought we would get to this stage when he was young. A lot of it is to do with the fact that I understand him and can read him like a book. I know exactly what situations are likely to trigger him and I know how to diffuse the situation before it happens. He has obviously grown to trust me now too. I have the closest relationship with him than any dog I've owned before. It's easy to manage in our normal day to day normal life, but I don't like taking him to new places. If we go away anywhere is is often OK for a day or two but then will get stressed and start to react to things he normally wouldn't. I am used to it now but I can't lie, he does restrict what I do quite a lot.

[AlanT]

I have been through resource guarding and now at nearly 3-years we are out the other side.

The only guarding problem now is my wife. He does like to keep me off the settee next to her, so he can keep her to himself.

I believe that these dogs have an in built need to know where things are. When you take something away it vanishes. They want to know its safe. This produces anxiety. They have excellent memory for such matters.

So when out walking I would hide something, I used golf balls. Under a tree, in a rabbit hole, under a pile of leaves. We would visit the hidden objects once a week. The dog had to find the object.

Even as a 6-month old he remembered the hiding places of a dozen balls.  We would play around and hide them again. We made a big fuss about the hiding. If I could not get the ball off him, I'd just hide another one.
After a while he'd drop the ball and I always showed him that I put it in a bag, in my right pocket.

I hid one some distance away and visited after 6-months. The dog found it easily.

Two things resulted from this. Both beneficial.

Gradually the dog trusted that I knew where things were and they would come back.

But rather wonderfully, the dog became a superb tracker and "blind-retriever".
There is a video of me working this dog on here. He's called Archie.

We have an old bed to put things in. He will take his things and put them back in there.

I now think I was a bit lucky. A golf-ball is almost small enough to swallow. I only use tennis balls now.
These are too big to hide easily so now we just do scent working.