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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).

But, this wasn’t his only issue so this issue will tell you about the other difficulties he also presented with. Before I do, I am going to apologise. I have always worked very hard not to use aversive training methods with Tag, reward based training has been the key, however, not all of the methods have quite followed the rule – so I am sorry. There were times where it felt like we had tried everything else and couldn’t think of any other solution. I do now however seek advice and enlist help to ensure future methods are up to date, reward based and force free. You only know what you know and at the time I thought I was doing the right thing I now know differently. Poop! So let’s get the unpleasant topic out of the way first – poop! Tag ate his own poop, he’d circle around, do his thing and before you knew it he was turning around and gobbling it up. Absolutely disgusting!! I am not sure why he did this so I did a lot of research online at the time. It may have been a lack of something in his diet so he was trying to re-digest the food (or something along those lines), another reason may have been having his nose rubbed in his own faeces whilst he was being house-trained by his first owners or finally it may have been that having lived in a kennel for a month and therefore his poop not being cleared up straight away he got into a habit of eating it to keep his ‘home’ clean. Now I am absolutely positive that there were much better ways of handling this but in the end my ex resorted to following Tag around the garden when he was let outside and sprinkling chilli powder onto his poop before he had chance to eat it. When Tag did try to pick it up he got a bit of a shock and put it straight back down. After a short while Tag stopped trying to eat his own poop and I’m pleased to say he hasn’t ever tried to take that habit back up. Car Chasing Another habit Tag had was car chasing. You would be quite happily walking down the street towards the field when a car would drive past and suddenly Tag yanks the lead so hard to chase it you almost go flying. If you didn’t let him chase the car he would just try again, and again, and again! Tag absolutely loves walks so whenever he chased a car I would just stop walking, sometimes I would even sit in the middle of the pavement, and we would stay there until several cars had gone past and he hadn’t reacted. As a reward we would start walking again. I’d love to say I brought clicker training into this and lots of tasty food but Tag is so excited by the world he mostly couldn’t care less what food you have in your pocket when you leave the house. Eventually Tag stopped chasing cars and I could walk down the street without fear of being pulled into a road. Now and again he might try and jump towards a car but it seems he only does it these days if he is particularly tense or we’ve had some pretty extreme weather – cars make a lot more noise when they are on a wet road.