By Fay Thomas
•
23 May, 2019
I read all sorts of ‘helpful’ articles online that said if your dog ever shows aggressive tendencies you shouldn’t encourage them to play games like tug-of-war. This is false, it helps release a lot of tension and energy – in fact it’s Tag’s favourite game and he will try and play it all of his toys, even balls, he’s not fussy. I am going to be upfront about resource guarding – there is no magic cure, he will always resource guard however the items he guards are now fewer and we can go days and weeks without any guarding. But then we can have times where it feels like we’ve stepped backwards. At the time I’m finishing this off he has spent the whole week hiding my slippers in his bed. They key to resource guarding, and I learned this the hard way, is not to shout, chase after them, try and snatch the item out of their mouth etc. – none of that helps, in fact it makes the whole situation worse. You get stressed and irritated, the dog gets more possessive as it too is getting stressed. The key was playing swapsies with him – finding something to exchange for the stolen treasure. This could be a favourite toy or food. Most often food worked better for Tag when in the house, however if you put the food near him and then try to pick up the stolen item that he’d dropped next to it this was usually a fail. We had to start slowly, show him the food, get his interest in it and then throw it away from ourselves. This usually led to the item being dropped where he was stood so that he could go to the food – much safer in my opinion than a battle of reflexes, (and let’s be honest a dog will always win that!). For a whole it was a 2-person job as well – mostly because I was still petrified as to how he would react. Over time I started to add the word ‘drop’ and Tag started associating the link between the word, dropping an item and receiving food. Additionally we practiced ‘drop’ a lot at training with his toys so the word became associated with fun as well – he dropped the toy which meant it got thrown away for him to chase. I have to say this really became a beautiful skill and he passed his impulse control element of APDT with flying colours first time around, (not bad for a resource guarding dog).