
04/17/2025
Important info on guarding behavior in dogs. š
Tomorrow marks the start of Dog Bite Prevention Week. So, today, we need to talk about resource guarding.
If you want to understand guarding, we have to go back, way back, to your dogās ancestors.
Remember when I talked about the predatory sequence? Thatās the built-in system predators use to hunt prey. It goes like this:
Orient ā Eye ā Stalk ā Chase ā Grab ā Kill ā Dissect ā Consume
Every predator needs to be born with this full sequence. If you're missing steps, you donāt catch food. And if you donāt catch food, you die. No exceptions.
Another piece of software ancient dogs needed to survive?
Resource guarding. When food is scarce, guarding what little you have is a matter of life or death.
But now itās 30,000 years later, and your dog is growling over a napkin they found on the sidewalk. Why?
Because guarding, like the predatory sequence, hasnāt been cleanly deleted from the system. Itās still there. But itās buggy.
Jean Donaldson, my teacher at The Academy for Dog Trainers, compares this to running outdated software on a modern machine. You get weird glitches.
Dogs donāt need to hunt anymore. They donāt need to guard scraps from a kill. We feed them from bowls. They live in houses. But the software still runs in the background, sometimes doing its own thing until it shows up in ways that seem bizarre to us.
A guarding dog isnāt broken. Heās running outdated code.
His ancestors guarded meat. He guards a sock. Or a Lego. Or a napkin.
Yes, his ancestors would probably laugh at him. But heās doing what his brain tells him is right.
And hereās the part that matters most for Dog Bite Prevention Week:
Dogs guard to ask for space.
If a dog is growling, thatās communication. Thatās a dog saying, āPlease donāt take this.ā
Growling is not a bad behaviour. Itās an ask for space.
The best thing you can do is listen. Step back. Respect the growl.
Punishing the growl doesnāt make the guarding go away. It just takes away the warning, and thatās when bites happen.
Guarding is normal. And itās also fixable. With the right help, we can teach dogs to feel safe when people come near their stuff.
For the best primer on guarding, read Mine! by Jean Donaldson.
If youāve got a herding breed and this stuff is hitting home, read my book, Urban Sheepdog: https://amzn.to/4g0o6VT