Restrain & resource guarding

Since this can be a concern, I am copying a question from one of the students from previous generation and my reply:

“I was wondering something, how do I aproach this exercise with out setting fundations for food resource guarding? This is something I reserched a lot because many friends told me Parsons had a huge issue with this.”

First part of the answer will have to do with the last part of the question – and it is similar to “it is your choice vs poke me dilemma”. Don’t ever rely on “they should be/do… and “they say if you do this…” – work with the dog in front of you. If the dog has low food drive, it is HIGHLY unlikely the dog will start resource guarding, because he doesn’t consider food to be a valuable resource.

In general I would never suggest some of these exercises to someone that exclusively wants/needs his dog to be a pet, companion to an elderly person or kids. Simply because it is not neccessary. But when we have working dog expectations for our dog, we have to understand that they are not robots. Sure, in ideal world your dog will have perfect manners, low energy and only polite behaviour in normal life, but at the same time it would be a complete “beast” on the course. However in reality very few dogs are capable of such switch. So we have to understand that we only encourage polite behaviours at home it will very likely happen that the dog will have hard time “letting loose” on the field as well. I like my sport dogs to be pushy around food, but obviously I always keep an eye on their behaviour. Generally the restrain teaches the dog what kind of action we expect for him to be able to get what he wants. But if the dog shows sighs of stress that are not just pulling in the direction of food, but very obvious signs of discomfort, I won’t be doing it, at least not in such way. As I have already suggested to many of you, this is an exercise that should be done with a lot of feeling and not too often throughout one meal, so it doesn’t get annoying. Once they know to pull towards food I will only do it once per meal – in the beginning, so they show me some “activation” and than get the rest of the meal for free, without disturbance. One thing I will make sure of is that there are no other dogs around when I do this. I don’t the dog to feel like I am restraining him from something so the other dog can get it, as it can really cause problems. And most often dogs will be pretty tolerant to you, but they won’t have the same tolerance to another dog in their bowl. Let me know if you have any more questions/doubts about it.