[ Post a Response | Rhodesian Ridgebacks And Friends ]
Posted by Sara2 on 12/18/2008, 5:34 pm, in reply to "Behavior Problem"
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I'd like to preface this entire post with this caveat: I'm not trained in animal behaviour, and these are just my thoughts about how I would handle this situation.
First, resource guarding is a natural dog behaviour. My dogs both guard objects from each other, and sometimes they growl at each other, but their growling isn't loud or sustained or "angry." It's more like they're just talking to each other: "I'm not giving you my bone!"
Selma tends to do more resource guarding from me and Robert than Lucius does. For instance, when we give her a bone, if we walk near her, she has the tendency to jump up and take the bone away (even if we aren't coming for the bone). We've worked on it with her, because we have to be able to take items from her for her own safety. We have practiced using a very low energy but firm command with her. We actually don't use any particular word; we just tell her to give her bone to us and we point firmly to the ground. When she puts the bone down, we remove it. We don't take things from her mouth (except in an emergency).
I think the thing for your friend to do might be to stop reacting to the growling. Because as you point out, your friend is likely encouraging the growling by allowing herself to be intimidated by it. So the first thing I would try would be a very calm, low-energy non-reaction and see how that works out. Basically, when the dog starts growling, she ignores it and holds her ground. Calm calm calm. If it helps (and it will take time to see if it does), I'd just keep it up and work on NILIF. If the dog escalates (if she snaps or bites) and your friend is scared, she should contact a behaviourist to help her learn to deal with the growling.
Ideally, your friend wouldn't feed her dog until the dog was disengaged from the food bowl and had relaxed. Then, she would ask the dog to sit and wait while she set the bowl down. It's important that the bowl doesn't come down until things are calm because things are easier to control while everyone is chilled out.
Is it possible that you could help demonstrate NILIF to your friend with her dog and with the friend standing outside the room where the dog is fed?
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