LIVING WITH DOG-DOG RESOURCE GUARDING – PART 1

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MY bone!
Posted on May 2, 2011 by pawsitivedawgs
LIVING WITH DOG-DOG RESOURCE GUARDING – PART 1



I put my hands up and admit that my dog, Rufus, is a dog-dog resource guarder and has been since he came home with me almost seven years ago.

I’ll go even further and confess that I tend to manage this issue now more than work on modification.

I have found dog-dog resource guarding, at least Rufus’ escalated version, the hardest of his many quirks to modify. In fact this is really the last big one that we haven’t made as much progress on. We have certainly reduced it and brought it to a manageable level but it’s still very much present in our everyday life.

Resource guarding is normal, natural and necessary dog behaviour, well animal behaviour – we all get a little tetchy when someone reaches across and takes some yummy off our plate!

It makes sense, from a survival point of view, that animals should defend their access to and possession of valuable resources. This may occur within species or across species boundaries. Ruf and I have also worked on human directed resource guarding resulting in him being pretty bomb-proof in that respect.



Dog-dog guarders may guard access to food, treats, chews, food bowls, favourite sleeping locations, toys, leashes, people, other animals and even areas or other stimuli associated with guarded possessions.

Dog-dog aggression is not something for the faint-hearted and it is essential that you call in professional help suitably qualified to help with dog-dog aggression. If dog-dog resource guarding has escalated to fights and/or wounds to either dog professional help from a qualified behaviourist is urgent – here’s more on choosing a behaviour professional.

DOG-DOG RESOURCE GUARDING FAQS
What does dog-dog resource guarding look like?

Resource guarding sees the use of very specific signaling in dogs. The main goal of this behaviour is to get a potential threat to move away. They use distance increasing signaling in order to increase proximity.

This may include freezing, holding the chin over the item, whale eye (very obvious whites of the eyes showing), hard staring, lip lifts (showing canine teeth), growling, snarling, tongue flicking and so on. This may even escalate to lunging and actual fights breaking out.

If its normal, natural and necessary why are we worrying about resource guarding?

A little bit of growling and hard staring toward a dog who moves away and keeps his distance is probably not going to do too much harm.

But we have to remember that resource guarding involves escalating stress responses from the guarder and putting dogs in such situations that they feel it necessary to behave like this is not really appropriate.

Guarding behaviour may well escalate or escalating signaling may be missed and aggression may be more likely.

Isn’t it best to allow dogs to sort this out amongst themselves?

Allowing dogs to sort it out amongst themselves is very limited in scope and effectiveness.

Dogs may have very different bite inhibition levels, may have very different fighting styles and may be different in size and strength.

Therefore, allowing them to possibly fight it out is a very dangerous decision.

Shouldn’t we just allow them to establish who is boss?

Relationships among familiar dogs where present are likely to involve rules concerning access to resources. Ideally, minimal signaling is needed to establish possession rules and there are times in a dog’s life when this sort of jostling is more pronounced (adolescence being the most likely stage).

Unfortunately we can never be sure of the reasons a particular dog has for aggressively defending his access to something so its best not to guess and possibly make the wrong decision, resulting in disaster.

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