Help! YorkiePoo with significant possession issues

795 Views 2 Replies 3 Participants Last post by Grabby, Jan 20, 2016

Oldadmark

Discussion Starter · Jan 20, 2016

We have a 5-6 yr old YorkiePoo (14lb rescue, not aware of exact age). He's a rather hyper dog but we've been trying to work with him on several issues. Most important is to try to somehow abate his possession issues. On many occasions he will become aggressive if we try to take away something he has an interest in. Sometimes it's a toy, sometimes it's food (bone etc). This morning, after taking him on an early morning walk, he came back into the vacation house were were renting and made a beeline for a sofa where he immediately put something in his mouth. He growled when I tried to take it. It was an old corn cob he picked up during our walk. I finally got it away from him after offering a treat away from the sofa but as soon as I went back to the sofa and grabbed the cob he wanted to fight me for it.

I'm probably doing something wrong or not enough so....any suggestions?

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cookieface

· #2 · Jan 20, 2016

Welcome to Dog Forum!

Resource guarding is a fairly normal, but undesirable, behavior. Fortunately, it's generally relatively easy to fix. See this thread for information: Resource Guarding, causes, prevention and modification

There is a difference between dealing with the behavior in the moment (the corn cob incident) and training to mitigate the issue. Your instincts with the corn cob were good; one suggestion would be to toss a treat away from the object so the dog chases it and you have a chance to grab the item. For training scenarios, you want to move much more slowly. The info in the link above provides good instruction.

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Grabby

· #3 · Jan 20, 2016

Jean Donaldson has a good book on the subject called Mine.

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