Episode #44 Guarding My Human

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This is The Puppy Training Podcast Episode #44: Guarding My Human. This podcast is designed to help you on your journey of becoming best friends through love and learning as you train your own dog from home, and I'm here to help you every step of the way. This is The Puppy Training Podcast, and I'm your host, Amy Jensen.  

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Hello, everyone and welcome. Thank you for listening and sharing this with others; we really appreciate your support. Today, we're talking about guardian behaviors as it applies to dogs and guarding their humans. Dogs make art anything: from their food, to their toys, chews, spaces, anything they value is theirs and don't want to lose. Sometimes this appears in the form of guarding their owner. There are lots of things that we can do with very young puppies to prevent this from occurring, as well as training methods we can employ to change a dog who currently guards into one who does not.  

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First, how was your week? Hopefully training is going well. This week has been a little crazy at our house, so training has taken a bit of a back step. But that's to be expected, because life happens and we all do the best we can do. It's a refreshing thought, right? Everyone is doing the best they can, and with that, we all are a little kinder to others as well as to ourselves. I do know that we're ready for spring here in Utah. I've been pulling out the boredom busters as even the dogs have spring fever. Boots's new favorite game is called "Find Your Treats". I put bits of dog food roll in containers and I hide them around my house while Boots is in a "down-stay". You've practiced good behaviors throughout the day, right? This is a great way to incorporate some of those "down-stays". Then when I say release, I add "Find your treats" and he runs from room-to-room trying to find the goods. He loves it, and so do I, because it provides him with both mental and physical exercise. I'd love to see videos of you and the boredom busters that your dog loves. Send them to info@baxterandbella.com with boredom busters as the subject line. I'm always up for new ideas. I love to see what you guys are doing out there with your dogs.  

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Today's topic is guarding behaviors; owners specifically. I'm gonna walk you through a few things that you can do to help your dog if you find yourself in this situation. Resource guardian means a dog is using aggressive behaviors to protect what they feel belongs to them. What does aggression look like in these cases? We're talking about snarling, growling, air-snapping, or biting. With very young puppies, it is important to regularly practice sharing as well as exchanging what they have for something better, and oftentimes, giving them right back what they previously had. We want puppies to learn that good things happen when someone approaches, even if they're doing something that they love, like doing a favorite toy or eating from their food bowl. Or when someone approaches you, if your puppy happens to guard you, if you are their favorite item. When others approach, drop a handful of yummy food on the ground for your puppy to sniff and eat. Sniffing calms dogs, and this distraction will help your puppy have a positive association with a person approaching you. Have others crouched down and offer your puppy a food reward with an open palm. Also creating a positive association for your puppy. If your puppy's too hesitant around a stranger, try having the stranger toss a treat away from them. This allows your puppy to retreat, which they probably already wanted to do in this case, and they get something good for it, which is a win-win for your puppy and that positive association has been planted.  

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I'm gonna talk a little bit about socialization here because with these brand new puppies is very helpful for them to be socialized and have positive and neutral experiences with a variety of people. This will help eliminate that need or that feeling in them to want to resource-guard you as their owner. We want to make sure that they are introduced to a variety of people. It's important that as they're doing so, they're having a positive or neutral experience. If your puppy has a negative experience when they meet someone, that's not effective socialization and will do more damage than good. We want to make sure that your puppies having a good time. We never want to force our puppy to approach someone or something that makes them feel uncomfortable. Instead, I like to act confidently. I'll walk up to the person, shake their hand, and then move along, helping my puppy to have a nice bounce back is what I call it. When they're walking along, they might show a startle or a fear response, and then they're like, "Oh, I'm fine", and they keep going. That's what I consider that bounce back. So we want them to successfully bounce back from that initial fear response. Now again, dogs are very specific, so comprehensive socialization is super important. This means we want to introduce them to people with facial hair, sunglasses, those wearing a backpack with a hood on, etc. If you live in a warm climate and your puppy doesn't get socialized to people wearing a coat with a hood on, and then you visit a colder climate or somebody comes and wears a coat with a hood on, and your puppy doesn't know what to do. Things like that we want to be very specific with. The more we introduce our puppy to things, the more they're able to generalize and they do better when they see something new; they have that bounce back ability. They're not gonna panic later on in life. We're talking children, toddlers, babies, teenagers, elderly, those with a walker, cane or crutches. I mean, the list goes on and on things like facial hair, dark hair versus light hair, long hair versus short hair. We want to make sure that our puppy is meeting lots and lots of people and getting rewarded for doing it in a positive away. A puppy who is well socialized will be more confident, and they'll exhibit fewer behavior problems than those who experience fear and anxiety because of the lack of socialization experience. Please put in the time with your puppies to socialize them well; I promise it is worth it.

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Now, what have your puppy already shows aggressive behavior when others approach you? I'm gonna take you through just a quick little snapshot of what this training looks like, but I highly recommend that you have a qualified behaviorist or trainer come to your home to help you formulate and implement a training plan if your dog is already exhibiting these behaviors.

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The basic concept surrounding turning this behavior around would be first management. We always want to prevent this behavior or other behaviors from being practiced as we work to train better behavior. For example, if your puppy growls at people when they approach you, go for walks where you will not be interrupted. When guests come to your home, crate your dog until training is to a level that your dog can be successful and interacting appropriately with that guest. You may want to muzzle train your dog, especially if there's a bite history or if there is concern in that regard. A qualified trainer can help you desensitize your puppy to a muzzle as well as help you with some of these other management ideas.  

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After you manage and control the situation as much as possible, we're going to employ a desensitization and counter-conditioning plan. Basically, we're wanting to change your puppies emotional response to people approaching you from fear and anxiety to a positive feeling or a good, happy feeling. We want to create positive associations with these events. We want your dog to change that fear and anxiety toward another person approaching to, "Awesome! I love it when people approach my owner because great things happen". This happens by first, identifying specifically when your dog guards you. It's really helpful to come up with that list, because you save time in the training process. If your dog doesn't mind that a little child comes up to you and gives you a hug, we don't need to spend time training that. We might use that case with the child if your puppy does feel relaxed when a child approaches to help desensitize your puppy to older and older people, but we don't necessarily need to start the training at that point. Being specific will save you time. Then, I want you to find your dog's threshold: at what point does your dog start to react to a person being close to you? This will also help save you time in training, because if your dog can handle a person from 50 feet away, or even 20 feet away, we don't necessarily want to start at 50 feet away. We don't want to start that training at 100 feet away if we don't have to. Finding that point at which your puppy reacts will save you time. It's also important to know that line because we want to know when our puppy will be in a relaxed state vs when they transition over to a stressed state. We want to do all of this training in a relaxed state. Start with the least intrusive experience first, and we're gonna work up to the most severe time your dog feels the need to guard you. Once you've made that list of when your dog's going to guard you, we want to be sure to start this training when your puppies in a nice, relaxed state and then we want to create as many successes as possible for your dog. We want to start with things that he may slightly feel the need to guard you, but not necessarily full blown guard you, versus that scenario when absolutely he feels stress and needs to guard you. We want to start out with those smaller experiences to help build successes. I always like to advise clients to have an emergency plan. There's going to be surprise encounters. Yes, we try to manage as best as we can, but there's going to be times when you can't do anything about it, and your puppy might go into these behaviors. We want to employ some kind of emergency plan where we just turn and walk away quickly. If your puppy sees the other person but hasn't reacted yet, you could absolutely drop a stash of boiled chicken on the ground to distract them. Something big and something that will capture their attention and hopefully prevent them from doing a negative reaction if caught by surprise. From there, you're gonna break it down into small behaviors. We're going to reward your puppy for seeing a person or anything else that they feel like is a trigger to them, but not reacting negatively. If your dog's threshold is 20 feet, I want you to work from 21 feet. When they see a person approaching, we're gonna reward your puppy. The timing here is super critical, as we don't want your puppy to be rewarded for growling or snarling or feeling tense. We want your puppy to be in a relaxed state when they see the other person and get rewarded in that relaxed state. As you achieve more and more successes, we're going to progress working to decrease that distance. Ultimately your puppy will be happy to let another person shake hands with you, give you a hug, or other interactions. Again, if your dog currently exhibits any sort of guarding behavior, please consult a trainer in your area to get hands on help and assistance. This is something that can be remedied and changed for the better, with effective techniques and, as always, safety first.

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That's it for today. You guys have a wonderful week and happy training. If you have a question about anything you heard on this podcast or any other puppy training question, visit my site, BaxterandBella.com to contact me.