If you have a puppy DO NOT take your dog’s food bowl away – once you have given it to him it is his.

Instead, while he is eating, occasionally approach and drop tasty goodies into his bowl and then leave him to it.

You want happy anticipation and a tail wag when you approach his food, not anxiety that you are going to take it away.

Whilst I quite enjoy a good resource-guarding case, I would rather you prevented it from happening.

Possessing and protecting food or items of high value to a canid is a natural behaviour, it’s a behaviour that even us, as humans do, we protect our stuff from other people. But with dogs, when it escalates into aggression towards their owner it is a huge scary problem.

The desire to possess and parade is present in all dogs in the same way that chasing and biting are, but to a greater or lesser extent depending on the breed. Gundogs specifically have a predisposition to possess and parade; they like to pick things up and carry them because it is a behaviour they have been specifically bred for.

Which is probably why the majority of resource guarding cases I see are mostly spaniels and spaniel crosses like Cockerpoos.

Because they love to carry items around, its built-in, hard-wired in their dna, but as puppies they had a huge history of items constantly being taken off them.

I had a client in, let’s call him Dick, not for guarding just general training, and he told me he took his dog’s food bowl off him a few times a week mid-meal just to make sure he could. Just to prove what a man/alpha/pack leader he was. I told him to pack it in, that was an accident waiting to happen as eventually, his dog may just decide enough is enough.

If someone stole food off my plate every time they walked past, they would first get a dirty look, then a warning and if they continued eventually they would get a fork in their hand!!!