Sharing an Advanced Dog Training Tip to Stop a Mini Goldendoodle’s Resource guarding

In this follow up session, we worked with mini Goldendoodle Berkley (Right, pictured here with her room mate Penny) on the resource guarding problem he was still having after our last in home dog training session in Omaha.

I originally worked with Berkley on this and a few other dog behavior problems late this summer. While things had improved considerably, Berkley’s resource guarding behavior regressed a bit after a visit to a new groomer around the same time one of the family’s kids moved out with his own dog.

After chatting a bit about the resource guarding problem, I did a quick refresher over the primary strategy to get a dog to stop resource guarding. The most concise way I can summarize it is; actions that tell the dog that when a person or dog approaches, they are not trying to take your stuff; in fact their arrival signals ever better things will happen.

As I was demonstrating the tips to get Berkley to stop resource guarding, I came up with a more advanced technique on the fly. To make sure Berkley’s guardians remember the process, we shot a quick video that you can check out below.

As a dog behavior expert, I have found that eliminating resource guarding is best done with a reasonably short term approach. You want to really rep it a lot throughout the day every day for a few weeks until the problem is gone.

I suggested that the guardians create a journal for each object, location or person she guards. This should include dates and times of any guarding behavior as well as how close they are getting when providing the high value reward.

They should then systematically deprogram the dog from feeling the need to resource guard that item or location based on the approach and treat-toss technique as well as the new revised approach shown in the above video.

Berkley’s guardians had done a lot of work with him, but didn’t completely exhaust the behavior. Now that they have a refresher and even more advanced technique, its going to come down to repping things as much as possible.

Id also like to see the humans boost the dog’s self-esteem by teaching new tricks or commands. Each guardian should teach both dogs a new trick each Sunday and then practice it all week long. The next week the other guardian would take their turn instructing the dogs with a different trick which is again practiced for the rest of the week.

By the end of the session, I was redirecting or removing the object from Berkley without incident. It will take practice, but Im confident the guardians will be able to help Berkley put this unwanted dog behavior problem behind her for good.