Teaching a Mini Goldendoodle to Stop Resource Guarding a Blanket

For this Omaha dog training session we helped Ollie, a 1 year-old Mini Goldendoodle who barks at unknown men who visit his home, resource guards toys and gets over excited at times.

Ollie did a tremendous amount of barking when I arrived for the session. I had asked the guardians to not do what they normally do when guests arrive as many people inadvertently reinforce the exact behavior they want to stop through their actions. 99% of the time, my approach settles the dog down sooner. But in this case, it backfired. Im guessing Ollie barked at me for an hour or more before relenting.

Once he settled down, I started offering some high value treats to encourage Ollie approaching and then moving away. While he was coming and going, I kept my body sideways, avoided eye contact and stopped moving when he approached. I refrained from trying to pet him as well as this almost always amplifies a fearful or insecure dog’s barking.

My goal was for him to learn that approaching me was a positive thing that he could do on his own. This is why I simply tossed the treat but did not encourage him to come and get it.

I suggested some creative ways to increase his exercise, suggested some rules to help the dog start to see the humans acting like leaders, ways to add structure, non verbal ways to disagree and how to reward desired behaviors so Ollie started to offer them instead of unwanted behaviors.

Next I addressed the primary dog behavior problem that Ollie’s guardians wanted to fix, stopping the dog from resource guarding of one of the children’s blankets. Helping a dog learn to stop resource guarding is actually pretty easy when you use positive dog training methods.

You don’t have to be a dog behavior expert or specialize as a mini Goldendoodle trainer to use the positive dog training tip I shared in the above video. It just takes practice and repetition.

Stopping a dog from resource guarding items is all about communicating that we aren’t interested in taking the dog’s item. But after shooting the above free dog training video, I started to wonder if Ollie was acting out in a way to get attention. I suspected this was the case based on how his barking when from protesting to attention seeking in the earlier part of our session.

If this is a way for the dog to get attention, petting with a purpose, passive training and enforcing rules consistently will help address that unwanted dog behavior problem.

To help the guardians remember all the dog behavior tips I shared with them in this in home dog training session, we shot a roadmap to success video.