Dogs Who Guard Their Food

“Don’t bother the dog while she’s eating.” It’s good advice. Even if your dog smiles and wiggles happily when you approach her bowl, chronic pestering at mealtime can sour that sweet attitude. But many dogs freeze up, curl their lips, growl, snap, or even bite if you go near their food. Here’s what to do if this sounds like your dog..

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As I’ve explained before, you should always respect your dog’s warning. Back off – confrontation can make a potentially dangerous situation worse. In the long term, you’ll be looking to teach your dog that your presence is no threat to her food. Instead, she learns that if you show up, delicious treats often show up too. It isn’t easy to teach this lesson, or to learn it, under conditions where she’s already tense. She can’t read the thought balloon over your head saying, “I’m not going to take away your food, Dogalini.” She can’t understand the words as you say them, either. She’s a dog. She perceives behavior that from her point of view presents a threat, and she reacts accordingly.

Help Your Dog Succeed by Working Slowly

So your starting point has to be the most vanilla version possible of the situation in which she guards her food.

It has to be so vanilla that she’s completely relaxed about it. She will have a much easier time learning the new “I don’t need to guard my food” lesson in the problem situation if she’s had some pre-training in situations that aren’t a problem.

Behavior modification is a lot like any other training in this way. You set up your learner to succeed by teaching a behavior in easy situations first. Once your dog has had a lot of practice in easy situations, you can up the ante, bit by bit. But if you start your anti-food-guarding practice in a situation where your dog is already tense, the odds are high that she will get another lesson in … feeling tense.

How to Tell Where to Start

If your dog guards food mildly, it may be easy to choose a starting point. A good guide, such as Jean Donaldson’s “Mine!” can help. Say you’ve noticed that she stiffens up and eats her dinner faster when you’re 10 feet away, but at 12 feet she pays you no mind at all and the muscles of her face and body look soft. You might start your program by standing 15 feet away from her while she eats, tossing a fingertip-sized piece of fried chicken in her direction, and then walking away again.

Suppose that after you’ve done this for half a dozen meals in a row, she looks up and gives you a big doggy grin and soft wag. Great. Do easy reps for another couple of meals. Then, for the next half a dozen meals, toss your chicken from 12 or 13 feet away. Once again, you’re looking for that happy face and wiggly wag. When you get it, you can start tossing the chicken from 11 feet away. Then 10． And so on.

Why You Should Get Professional Help

This sounds simple enough, right? If your dog’s behavior is as mild as that of the dog in my example, you may be able to fix it on your own. But almost always, you’ll be better off if you get professional help to plan your program and coach you through it. Here are 6 reasons why:

Reason #1: Food guarding is often more complicated than my example. For instance, how intensely a dog guards her food may depend on what she’s eating, on whether the person approaching her is familiar, on whether someone has used confrontational methods on this behavior in the past, on how much stress the dog has experienced on a given day, and even on the location where she eats.

Reason # 2: Many dogs who guard food also guard toys or resting places. The more “hot topics” your dog has, the harder it will be for you to cool them down on your own.

Reason #3: Most non-experts have trouble recognizing subtle canine “back off” signals and other signs of stress. A qualified behavior specialist can educate your eye.

Reason #4: If you have some success, you will be tempted to speed up your program. And the key to messing up your program is, you guessed it, speed. A good behavior specialist will remind you, as often as you need reminding, that if you feel like you’re progressing too slowly, it’s time to slow down.

Reason #5: Some dogs are so charged up and stressed out around food and meals that any engagement at all only makes the problem worse. For these dogs, the best starting point can be a few weeks or a month of just being left alone around their food. Any time a behavior issue is that fraught, you need professional help. Trust me on this.

Reason #6: A well-educated behavior professional can spot medical conditions that often affect behavior, and will refer you to a vet for diagnosis and treatment. She’ll also be able to judge when it’s appropriate to consider behavioral medication for your dog. For example, it seems as if some percentage of food-guarding dogs also have chronic gastrointestinal problems. Many of these dogs not only guard their food but act weirdly anxious around it, as if they want to eat but are simultaneously afraid to. Cases like this pose a challenge even with medical help and expert behavior modification.

Behavior change is hard – you know this if you’ve quit smoking or started an exercise program. And no ethical trainer or behavior specialist will guarantee your dog’s problems can be fixed once and for all. But careful behavior modification has good odds of getting you to where life is happy and safe for both you and your dog.

You can follow The Dog Trainer on Twitter, where I’m Dogalini, as well as on Facebook, and write to me at dogtrainer@quickanddirtytips.com. I welcome your comments and suggestions, and I may use them as the basis for future articles. Thank you for reading!
 

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