Lately we have been making some changes to our web site here at Collins Canine are would like to utilize our blog to help get more information out to people. Our highest priority is to keep dogs in a home and we feel that education is a crucial part in that effort. To help with that we are going to start posting some more general training information here. For those of you looking for a Darcy fix, a lot of the pictures and video will still have her in them.
To start out with I want to post some videos of "good" behavior. Here are some videos of both my dogs around different resources. We have always worked with a lot of dogs that have resource guarding issues and found that it is often helpful to see some dogs that do not guard resources. In these videos I use both my actual hand and what we call an Asses-a-Hand. As trainers we often use this devise so we don't risk getting bit ourselves. One other note on these videos - they were taken by my five year old son so they are a bit wobbly and have a bit of a commentary. When I made these we had an urgent need so he was the only one around. But it does bring up a good discussion relating to this topic and children. Resource guarding is a very serious issue in general but it is something that children should never be around. Kids usually have a very hard time recognizing when they should not be around the dog so relying on the child to keep away from a dog when they have a resource is a recipe for disaster. When kids are around they often carry around food or have toys that the dog may decide is his or hers. When we are working with a dog that has any sort of resource guarding issues one of our first questions is if the dog will ever be around kids because it will have a huge impact on what we need to set as our goals. While neither of my dogs ever had any issues we resources it is something that we still worked on extensively. Only because of this would I allow my son to be in this situation.
Here is a video of Bella, our ten year old Rottweiler around her food. She likes her food but isn't crazy about it. After we adopted her at a year old we did extensive work with resources since we knew she would be around kids at some point.
Here is a video of Darcy, our three year old Pit Bull and her food. She is food crazy and scarfs it down no matter what. She has never had issues with resources and since we adopted her we have not done as much work on resources as we did with Bella. Busy mom syndrome I guess...
This is a video of Bella with a rawhide. Both dogs love rawhides more than any other toy out there.
Lastly, here is Darcy with the rawhide. She does get a bit upset as evidenced by the hard stare she gives me when I grab the rawhide. She does relinquish it though.
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