[Allie3985]

So Zerbert gets pretty snarky with the other dogs at the club, especially when food is involved. She almost never becomes reactive until the dog tries to sniff her are barks at her. . .shows some interest in her or some interest in her food. This means that she is not reactive until the dog is in extremely close proximity to her, in which case she grrr-arf-arfs at the dog until he or she gets out of her space.

I have, of course, tried a plethora of solutions to no avail. I was reading an article on teaching resource gaurders to welcome other dogs by marking and treating when a dog enters the room (its more complicated than that but I don't want to explain the whole thing). This doesn't help me because my problems start when the other dog is in close proximity to my dog. I decided to teach her to target the other dogs with her mouth since this behavior would be incompatible with snarking.

I taught her to give "kisses" to my other two dogs. I will start asking for the behavior with a friendly classmate. I will probably start with having her target the backside of the dog and very slowly work my way up to around the face. I'm sure I'm not the first to try this out so if anyone knows of some literature on it or has tried it themselves, I would love some input!

[TooneyDogs]

Have you tried working both dogs side by side...Sits, Downs, Come Front, etc. and treating both of them for following your commands? That re-direction of her attention off of the other dog and on to you has a couple of benefits...first, as part of her attention training and secondly, learning that a dog next to her isn't so bad....she still gets rewards/attention.

[Allie3985]

Originally Posted by TooneyDogs

Have you tried working both dogs side by side...Sits, Downs, Come Front, etc. and treating both of them for following your commands? That re-direction of her attention off of the other dog and on to you has a couple of benefits...first, as part of her attention training and secondly, learning that a dog next to her isn't so bad....she still gets rewards/attention.

She does great with that kind of thing. I do lots of training with all three of mine (she has no problem with my other two) at the same time, and we practice like this at the club quite often too. She completely ignores the other dogs and has beautiful attention. The problem comes in when the other dog gets in her face. I need to teach her that it is okay not only for them to be around, but for them to touch her since it inevitably happens.

I eventually need to not only reinforce her targeting another dog, but treat her when another dog approaches and touches her. That is just a little too much for her right now with strange dogs.

Here a couple videos of her learning this. We just started working on it today but one video is verbally cued and she is targeting Pickles and the other is not cued and marked with signals and she is targeting Mary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGbSQ44cqw4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gaf-mRa6RU

[dakotajo]

My MIL dog that I looked after for over 3 weeks had that food guarding problem. Whenever my dog or the cats came near her dish she would start the growling etc.... I found that what worked for her is when I would step in and make sure she saw that I was controlling the other animals and if they went near her food that I made sure they didn't take any of it but only went near it. It seemed like once she saw that I was the one in charge she was okay with that. She was a little devil when she first came here but she actually liked being with us quite a bit after. Kinda miss the little bugger

[Allie3985]

I hear ya! I've had to be very aware of what is going on at feeding time at home but with strange dogs it has gone from a food guarding thing to just being all around snarky with any dogs that touch her whether food is involved or not. So frustrating!