Resource Guarding in Dogs: What To Do About It with Jean Donaldson
Renowned dog trainer Jean Donaldson joins Zazie and Kristi to talk about what to do if your dog guards food, objects or locations, and why she wrote a second edition of her book Mine!
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Resource guarding in dogs with Jean Donaldson
Jean Donaldson has just published a new edition of her book Mine! A Practical Guide to Resource Guarding in Dogs. If you have a dog who guards food, objects, people, or locations, you need this book! Jean joins Zazie and Kristi to discuss what to do if your dog guards food, locations, or other resources.
We talk about:
- Why it was time for a new edition of Mine! and what it was like to write it
- How to decide if your dog needs a regular training plan or a more incremental one to resolve their guarding behaviour
- Why it's a myth that you should be able to take your dog's food away from them
- How we can add food to puppies' bowls to help prevent food guarding
- Why there's not really anything wrong with the personality of a dog who guards resources
- The other behaviour issues that sometimes accompany guarding behaviour
- What it means to be "warmed up" or "cold" in a dog training plan
- Why dog trainers like the spicy dogs
- The Olde English Sheepdog who was a bit of a challenge
- Guarding behaviour in Jean's dog Buffy and Kristi's dogs Archer and Soleil
- When to hire a dog trainer to help with resource guarding
The book Jean recommended to us is The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Kastor.
Mine! A Practical Guide to Resource Guarding in Dogs by Jean Donaldson is available wherever books are sold.
To be the first to learn about Bark! Fest, the book festival for animal lovers, sign up to the Companion Animal Psychology newsletter.
Jean Donaldson is one of the world's top dog trainers, founder of the Academy for Dog Trainers, and author of the seminal book Culture Clash, which was named number one training and behaviour book by The Association of Pet Dog Trainers. In 2017, Jean authored and instructed Dog Training 101 for The Great Courses, another wonderful resource for dog guardians. Her most recent book is the second edition of Mine! A Practical Guide to Resource Guarding in Dogs.
Follow Jean at the Academy for Dog Trainers:
You might also like: Understanding resource guarding in dogs and how to fix it with Lisa Skavienski
Transcript of the conversation with Jean Donaldson about Mine! and resource guarding
Zazie: If your dog guards food or other resources, it can be quite distressing. And also there are so many myths about what you should do about it that it's hard to know what to do.
So we're going to talk about the facts and what you should do about it today. And we're joined by the renowned dog trainer Jean Donaldson because she has just published a second edition of her book Mine! A Practical Guide to Resource Guarding in Dogs,
which I'm just holding up to the camera. It's got a gorgeous blue cover with a cartoon drawing of Buffy the Chow Chow with a giant bone.
So gorgeous, gorgeous cover. Really love that.
Welcome to The Pawsitive Post in Conversation. I'm Zazie Todd and I'm joined as always by my friend and co host, Kristi Benson.
Hey, Kristi, do any of your dogs guard things?
Kristi: Why, yes, they do. In fact, I have Archer sitting behind me on a couch and he guards like,
if he picks up something super gross, like a, you know, a.
Something like a bone with some kind of rot about it, he will be like, this is mine and you will not get it back.
Zazie: And Pepper sometimes guards his food too. So, Gene, I'm thrilled that we can talk to you about this. We're joined today by Jean Donaldson, who is one of the world's top dog trainers.
She's the founder of the Academy for Dog Trainers and she's the author of the seminal book Culture Clash, which was named number one training and behavior book by the association of Pet Dog trainers. And in 2017, Jean authored and Dog Training 101 for the Great Courses, which I highly recommend.
It's a fantastic course.
And her most recent book is the second edition of Mine! A Practical Guide to Resource Guarding in Dogs. And that's what she's here to talk to us about today. Jean, thank you for joining us.
Jean: Thanks for having me.
Zazie: We're thrilled to have you here. And the first edition of Mine! has helped so many people.
So what made you decide to do a second edition of the book?
Jean: That's a great question. And the short answer is that about 20 or almost 25 years of additional cases under my belt and so refining what needs to be done and what actually is superfluous.
So the first edition really had every conceivable sort of step. It was very incremental plans because I was thinking, geez, you know, here's how many cases I've done, and this is going to be people probably doing some DIY with it.
They may not be under the supervision of a trainer. And so I didn't want people to get into trouble. So even though it has all the disclaimers and it says, please contact a competent trainer, and all that,
I put in every conceivable split to kind of put the brakes on people so they would go slowly and then they wouldn't have an incident.
Since then, having done a lot more cases and coached a lot of Academy graduates and trainers on cases,
I've sort of refined the plans that the vast majority of dogs are going to need these steps,
and only some will need these additional steps. And so I was able to make it more efficient so that people can then kind of go a la carte a little bit more, rather than having to do every conceivable incremental step.
Kristi: So it's been, you're saying, like 25, 20 years?
Jean: Yeah, yeah, over 20. I think I. I think it was. It's something on the order of 24 years between the two editions since writing the two editions. So it's a lot of additional cases.
Kristi: I'm. For the people who are listening, I'm holding both versions up right now. One's, they're pretty similar, actually, in style with the bold font and.
Jean: Yeah, yeah, yeah. DogWise sort of decided they. They enlisted Lili Chin to do the. The new cover. And, you know, she said, oh, do you have any requests? And I said, well, you know, can it possibly be Buffy?
And she. She kindly obliged.
Kristi: So how did you feel? Just like, from, you know, Zazie and I, this is a dog book, essentially podcast. So how did you feel revisiting your words from 20 years ago?
Were you. Was it like, oh, this is an old friend, or was it like, oh, my God, get me away from this?
Jean: It was absolutely the latter.
Zazie: Painful.
Jean: Painful.
Kristi: Yeah, yeah.
Jean: I mean, I said, oh, I redid the book because, you know, more efficient plans and, you know, a little better organ also,
I think, you know, the writing I found painful. It's probably too strong,
but I was very glad to also revise the writing.
Kristi: The writing is a lot. I think it's a different sort of approach. It's very fluid. It's very inviting. The new text. Yeah, yeah.
Jean: A little more friendly, a little less sort of like, A little less sort of like, you know, okay, make sure I, you know, put in every conceivable concept in the passive voice, you know.
Zazie: Well, and you already alluded to the fact that the book,
it does still have some slower, more incremental plans, but it also has some regular plans that people can follow as well.
So how should someone decide which type of plan they should follow in the book?
Jean: What they should do is they should use the standard plan and then see if they get stuck and make sure they read sort of the procedural stuff. One of the key things in resource guarding is partly following the right plan, but also making sure that technically doing it right.
And so it's a lot of sort of little picky, techy details. And when I coach trainers who are stuck,
sometimes it turns out that it is a dog that needs those additional steps. But sometimes it is the case that they're just, they're, they're, they're doing sort of a mission critical error.
And once that's corrected, they can actually stick with the standard plan. So provided people are actually doing the procedure correctly, they should do the standard plan. And then if they get stuck and there's, there are sort of canonic places where dogs tend to get stuck in the plans and then they can just refer to after the plan says,
okay, if you're stuck on step, do now add these additional steps.
Kristi: So I think myth busting is something that you,
I mean, you sort of understand how important it is, but you also do it really well. And one of the common myths that we sort of hear quite a bit from, you know, maybe old time dog trainers is that you should be able to take away your dog's food.
So why is that such a problem? Why is that wrong?
Jean: I think in the old days, way, way back,
it used to be that it was seen as sort of a character emblem in dogs, that if they guarded things or if they aggress towards their owners, then nowadays we normally want to rule out the two sort of big bugaboos, which are resource guarding and body handling.
So if the owner, if the dog actually likes the owner's not fearful, it's not a new person for them and they're aggressing towards the owner. The first two sort of, you know, horses not zebras, things to look for are, does the dog have a problem with certain kinds of body handling or is he guarding resources?
In the old days, it used to be seen as the dog is dominant. And this was sort of. It implied kind of an immutable character trait that there was something kind of wrong with this dog rather than he's just doing a thing that we would rather he not do.
And so I think ascribing, you know,
that somehow this dog is trying to put one over on the owner and trying to sort of take over the household is just sort of. It's kind of overkill. It always looked to me as though dogs were kind of just running this wonky software that looked very similar to what you see on Animal Planet when you see sort of,
you know, hyenas guarding a piece of bone from each other or what have you.
And so it just seemed like, you know, and plus it's modifiability. So very early on,
way, way back, this was sort of before people even referred to it as resource guarding. And it used to be called dominance aggression, or there's something wrong with the dog.
Ian Dunbar used to sort of say, well, in puppy classes, you should do this basic prevention exercise where you approach the puppy at his dish and give him bonuses. And that's meant to prevent food guarding.
And I thought, well, you know, if that's when we did it, I mean, we did it routinely in puppy classes and that we just had.
And it, you know, certainly was in the can't hurt, might help category. And then as sort of adults presented themselves with resource guarding,
it occurred to me, well, you know, you can kind of do the same thing, but you just need to break it down a little bit more to make it safe.
Because now we've got an adult dog and we've got an existing problem rather than doing prevention.
And so, lo and behold, it turned out to be highly modifiable. I mean, compared to, you know, some stuff that we try to fix in dogs. And it, you know, and it just seems like, okay, if it's so easy to fix with some chicken,
how can it possibly be sort of a character trait, you know?
Zazie: Yeah, absolutely. And then there are some other myths about resource guarding as well that I think that you address very well in the book and we can probably talk about now.
So resource guarding doesn't mean that the dog is being abnormal, and it also doesn't mean that the person has been spoiling their dog, does it?
Jean: Right. It's not pathology. It's normal animal behavior. The reason that it's hit and miss in dogs is because of domestication. There's no longer strong selection pressure to make sure it's fixed.
Okay, so you know, 100% of lions do it, 100% of wolves do it. What have you in dogs. Nobody is selecting breeding stock on the basis of whether they resource guard or not.
And so it sort of crops up and then it can crop up on, you know, weird stuff like tennis balls, which are, you know, weird. But it's not pathology, it's.
It's sort of a wren, it's a vestigial normal animal behavior. So it's kind of fascinating in that regard. So it's not pathology. Doesn't mean something wrong. And I think sometimes people think, well, the owner's been indulgent.
They've, you know, quote unquote spoiled the dog, you know, And I don't know about you, but when you unpack,
terms like spoiling the dog usually unpacks as somebody's being kind to their dog. You know, they're meeting the dog's need and they're not being sort of, you know, you know, a fascist with the dog.
And so I always, I always have problems with that term,
basically spoiling the dog. And certainly it crops up, you know, it comes on usually at a certain age, kind of like clockwork, regardless of history.
So it seems to me that it's something in the dog rather than something that is induced by something the owner does.
Kristi: Yeah, this. We just had some friends over who are going to be house sitting our house and I was explaining to them, like when Archer's on the bed and if you don't want him on the bed,
he is quite large, you have to kind of go get a cookie and prompt him off because.
And it just, it brought up this interesting thought in my head that I think a lot of people would be like, well, your dog's bad. Like, because I said essentially he'll growl at you if you push him off the bed.
I was like, you know, this is just something that will happen. But you can easily get him off. If you just get a cookie, he'll come running out, no big deal.
And the looks on their faces, I think they're a little bit like, oh, and I just thought, you know,
if you didn't consent to have somebody take your thing or if you didn't consent to have somebody move your body.
Jean: Right.
Kristi: Why, why is that any different? But you know, people think differently about dogs. They moralize about it. Anyway, I just, I had a little bit of a hidden eye roll about that.
Jean: Yeah, we have come a long way in sort of normalizing, kind of normal, non injurious, non lethal levels of aggression in Dogs. But we still have a ways to go where humans can.
We can have conflict and we can argue and we can, you know, do all that stuff. And when dogs do it, you know, it's still sort of considered to be like a big deal.
Kristi: Yeah. So when, when I was a student in the academy, I lost one point on one of my assignments, and I'll never forget it.
And it was for not bringing, not like bringing in the warmup on a plan.
So what is warmup? Why did I fail my 1 point gene? And why does it matter for resource guarding?
Jean: My recollection is that you did pretty good.
Warm up is something which is a particular kind of thing, which is sometimes applicable in dog training and sometimes not. So when we're trying to teach dogs down stays, we typically don't think about, okay, does the dog have to perform quote unquote cold?
Does he have to do it as soon as we sort of, you know, give the first cue and does he have to immediately do it? You know, and if we have to give a second prompt or cue that it's a, you know, a lethal error.
And so in some things it doesn't matter. In some things it does. So if you think about jumping up, we want dogs to not jump up at all. And they tend to jump up when they're cold when we first come into the room or somebody comes over and they're greeting.
So by definition, it's worse when it's cold and we need it cold. Okay,
same thing with like food and object guarding and location guarding,
that we want it cold. We don't want the dog to aggress at all.
And in real life settings, when we're going to approach the. The first time. So the first time we go past this food bowl, the first time we approach Archer on the bed or the sofa, we want him to not guard.
We don't want him sort of do it. And then, and then say, okay, well, let's get a training session going. And once the dog is kind of in training, where they go, oh, yeah, these exercises I remember now.
I love this. Okay, so there's a difference between the dog doing it warmed up and then doing it stone cold. And that's something that tends to crop up again and again.
And so it's really important that we train towards the goal of having the dog do it no matter what. So regardless of whether we look like we're in training mode, regardless of whether he's had some reps to get him sort of like in the, in the mood to train Yeah,
Zazie: I like how clear that is, and I like how clear everything is in the book, actually, if someone wants to follow one of these plans, it's, you know, they can just do it.
It's great.
And another thing that you mention in the book is that sometimes if a dog is a resource guarder, there might be other issues that come along with that as well.
So you've got a little section on possible comorbidities. What are those?
Jean: So the two big ones are food and object gardening. Food and object gardening. Not always. Sometimes they do one, sometimes they do the other. But quite often, if you've got one, check for the other and then the other one, which I'm not sure, and I'm going to say this, but I can't back it up as readily as I can.
Food and object gardening. Sometimes there's body handling with resource guarders.
We affectionately call them in the Academy, "Don't touch me. Don't touch my stuff."
So dogs who are just a little bit prickly about resources can sometimes also be a little bit prickly about body handling.
Whether that's true or whether that's just some artifact that I have noticed and I've got a bias, I'm not sure. And why it would be, I'm also not sure.
Zazie: Interesting. No, but that's. I think that's a good way to think of it, though, the way that you talk of it as don't touch me, don't touch my stuff.
Kristi: Yeah.
Zazie: Yeah.
Kristi: That certainly describes Archer.
Yeah,
he likes being patted in certain ways, but there's lots of ways that. And he looks like such a giant teddy bear. We always have to tell people he's not, you know, he doesn't like being hugged.
He'll. He'll be very clear about what he doesn't like, and he will tell you in a minute.
Jean: But yeah,
yes, yes, I do. I do a lot of Chows and Chows have exactly that, too. They look teddy bears and they look cute and they look kind of. Oh, my God.
And people do want to go up and hug them. And it's not a breed you want to go up and hug.
Kristi: But randomly, his sister is touch my stuff. Touch me. I love it all, you know?
Jean: Yep, gene.
Kristi: So a lot of dog trainers, I think, as our listeners can probably tell because we're laughing so much with kind of glee about Archer and his what we find to be kind of hilarious behavior.
A lot of dog trainers kind of like spicy guarders. We find them interesting. You know, and you were talking earlier about just how trainable of a thing it is. So I think we don't look at it as, oh my God, this is a thing we're looking at as, oh,
here's something I could fix if I, if, if I felt like it.
Jean: Right. You know, and it's kind of optional. You know what? One of the standard things that we do, because dogs do it also routinely against each other.
Kristi: Yeah.
Jean: So our, our sort of standard operating procedure is if dogs are guarding against people, locations, objects, food,
Labs or whatever, we want to get in there and fix it and change it. Or in your case, you want to just kind of manage it and let people know when dogs are doing it against other dogs.
The first line of defense is to do nothing. So if they're not hurting
Each other, so they're not actually inflicting injuries, and if no dog is being made fearful. So let's say there's dogs in a household and one dog is guarding against the other and the other dog's becoming fearful,
then we want to sort of think about what we're going to do. But if none of those things are present,
then the first thing to tell people is just let them do it. It's just like people arguing.
It's very normal. Dogs cope with it much better than we humans do. We humans have a bit of a freak out factor about it.
Dogs tend to cope really well. They read each other well and they mind each other's stuff. And so we don't have to fix it. It really is, you know, so part of my, my goal from the get go with this was to just tame everybody's, you know, excitement about it,
that it is not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, you know, dogs who have injurious bites and hate strangers, you know, that kind of stuff. It's not in that kind of class for sure.
Kristi: So I think right now in my life, my favorite guarder is actually Soleil because she will guard things not in her possession. So if Archer is sitting there with something he's chewing, she'll lay in front of him and look very cute.
But she's guarding what he has against our other dog.
And so many cookies,
she'll take it. But she's just like, I got you, I got you, boo. I'll keep them away.
Zazie: Look, it's really funny.
Jean: Yeah.
Kristi: Who was your favorite guarder like?
Jean: Buffy.
I mean, I've had a number of them in Brian, he guards greenies. I fixed it for just for the purposes of a video. I didn't have it because he's small.
But Buffy had the works. I mean, she. You know, I got her as a small puppy,
and she guarded every single thing from every single living, breathing thing.
And so she was considered, like, a big reject. So she didn't pass any of her shelter tests. So I took her as a foster puppy because, you know, she didn't pass any of the tests.
And it was considered also, as much as it was sort of considered kind of pathological and a sign of a. Kind of a bad temperament or what have you in.
In adult dogs, if it crops up in puppies, it was totally like demon seed. Like, puppies should not do this, you know, and she was doing it at five or six weeks,
modified really readily, but. But I. We kept it in place for dogs. And she's kind of like Soleil. She used to. We'd be in the office when the academy was sort of a live program, and we'd have, you know, in the training office,
Buffy would take, like, a toy or a bone, and she'd go and she'd put it in front of some dog, and then she sort of back up and then lie down, and she's like, you know, like, make my day just for sport.
I mean, she had, like, a spicy streak. And unlike you, I kind of like the spice. There are people and for sure who don't like the spicy dogs, and that's okay.
But I. I quite like a spicy dog.
Kristi: Yeah.
And I mean, like, if you don't like your dogs guarding like that, and you're a trainer,
train it. Like, training is great. Dogs love training. It's not gonna. Yeah, right.
It's also fine if, you know, like you said, no one's getting hurt. No one's getting scared. So it's fine to let our dogs communicate with each other. Yeah.
Zazie: When Pepper first came to live with us, it turned out that he actually guarded his food. And so he's a Shih Tzu. He's really quite small.
And my husband put his food down and then walked back into the middle of the kitchen. And Pepper followed him, growling,
and kind of stood there for a while growling at him. And in a much earlier episode of this podcast, I told Kristi about that, and we had a good laugh about it.
And then I felt really guilty for laughing because I thought Pepper. I mean, he doesn't do it anymore. It was very easily resolved. But in that moment, he was growling because he was upset and worried that his food was gonna be taken away.
And then I felt really bad for laughing.
Jean: He was anticipating this whole scenario.
Zazie: Yes. He didn't know he'd come to a home where that would never, ever happen to him.
Jean: Right, right. Yeah, that. It's all sort of. It's all sort of so terrible. I've had cases way back where had dogs where you said, let's say if they feed the dog.
Absolutely at a certain hour of the day, sort of half an hour before that time, the dog would not let anybody in the kitchen.
In other words, the guarding sort of bleeding out in time and bleeding out in space. So we had this dog who's like, even before the meal was prepared or put down, the dog is like, nobody's coming in this kitchen.
And it's kind of self defeating if you think about it, because the dog's not going to get a meal if he's not letting anybody in the kitchen.
So dogs.
Zazie: Yeah. So you've obviously taken thousands of these cases. Is there a case that you've had that sticks out as being tricky to resolve, but it did resolve beautifully?
Jean: Yeah, there was one. And, you know, I think I went over it in the Academy. There was an Old English Sheepdog who sometimes owners, because the owners are trying to get our attention, sometimes they can use a little bit of hyperbole and just to make sure that we understand that it's serious,
they don't know that we are gonna take their issues seriously. And so this owner said,
my dog guards everything.
And I thought, well, you know, unlikely, you know, but maybe. And sure enough, this dog did, you know, no matter what piece of matter you put next to this dog, even something he didn't like,
if you put it within his sort of radius,
you could not approach the dog with. With anything. And so it was sort of an interesting thing that the owner was quite right and this dog had, you know, bitten her quite badly.
And so it was, and it was for me, relatively early on. So it was a. For me, it was a tough to navigate case. He did fine,
but there was a lot of sort of, you know, messing around to get there.
Kristi: So I think that almost leads quite nicely into our last question here, which is about when should someone hire a dog trainer? So we have great resources,
you know, like with the new version of your book. But when is it time for someone to reach out to a dog trainer?
Jean: You know, I would say that I think the safest answer is to get a competent trainer on board for pretty much anything, you know,
especially something where there's potential harm. So if a dog is growling, snarling, snapping, biting,
immediately get yourself into competent hands. And people know, and I'm sure you've gone over this many times, that it's a bit of a jungle out there, that there's a huge variety of levels of competence and humaneness among dog trainers.
And so people should either go, like, to the Academy site or to Pet Professional Guilder, one of the places, and be very choosy about which trainer you hire. It is still the case that you could hire somebody who's going to come and make it worse.
So be really careful. Be a smart shopper.
Zazie: Yeah, I think that's really important advice because if you get the wrong person, you are going to make it worse. You really do need to get someone who is going to use the right techniques, which are covered so beautifully in this book.
So this book is an amazing resource, I think, for anyone who has a dog who guards resources of any kind. So thank you so much for putting together a second edition of it, Jean.
It's very much appreciated and we always like to ask our guests to recommend a book to us. So what have you been reading recently that you loved?
Jean: The most recent book that I read that I loved, and I apologize that it's off topic, although there's a bit of resource guarding in it. It's called The Eagle and the Hart by Dr. Helen Castor.
It's about the thing that happened when Richard II was deposed by his cousin Henry IV. And it's because he was a rubbish king and, you know, he got everybody sort of against him.
He was actually very sort of covetous and mercenary and just not competent.
And so his cousin had to sort of come along and depose him. So it was sort of this wrestling for the, you know, the ultimate resource, which was the throne of England.
Zazie: That sounds really fascinating. Thank you.
And so I'm going to hold your book up again so that people watching can see this beautiful cover.
Mine! is available wherever books are sold. It's published by Dogwise. And if people want to know more about you, Jean, they go to the Academy for Dog Trainers website.
Jean: That's right.
Zazie: And if you've enjoyed this conversation, I've actually got some very exciting news to share with you, which is that we will be talking to Jean again at Bark! Fest 2026.
That's right. There is going to be another Bark! Fest, the book festival for animal lovers happening this September.
And if you want to get all of the details, make sure you go to my website, companionanimalpsychology.com and you'll find all of the details there as they are released. So, Jean, thank you so much for talking to us today and thank you so much for agreeing to come back and talk to us again in September.
Jean: Thank you for having me.
Zazie: We're thrilled. And today I would like to give a special shout out to our listeners in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thank you for being with us.
And wherever you're joining us from, thank you so much for joining us today and if you found this interesting or useful, please be sure to tell a friend about it who also will enjoy the episode and we will see you next time. Bye bye.
This transcript has been lightly edited for content and style.
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