The Gift of Behavioral Issues

I remember the first time Dazzle lowered his head and growled at me over a bone I’d just given him. He was young—around 8 months old—and I felt I had done everything right—took him to classes, fed him  a premium diet, including raw, meaty bones, walked him three times a day, every day and played with him in between. He had started basic obedience classes and puppy agility. I knew he had a good life and I worked hard to be able to afford to do it all—where did I go wrong?

To be honest, I felt betrayed—how could he guard something given to him by the very person who provided it—and provided it over and over again. He had no scarcity of resources; anything he ate or chewed was replaced with something new.

Like most owners experiencing this for the first time, I had to learn that his behavior had nothing to do with me and what I had or hadn’t done for him. And why he was like this was irrelevant. He was insecure with his food and bones, and I needed to learn how to make him more secure and change how he felt about me approaching his food bowl or bones.

So, like everyone else, I looked for a trainer with experience in food guarding and worked through the protocol that would help Dazzle see me as a provider instead of a thief. I learned a lot about how he saw the situation and how to communicate with him in ways that he could understand. I tightened his boundaries so that he would know what to expect and what was expected of him. And, eventually, we came out the other end. I’d need to do maintenance with him throughout his life—randomly approaching his bowl, announcing that I was there (I’d say “incoming!”) and then adding some high value treats to his bowl. And I worked on getting him to drop and leave his bones when I needed to move him.

At that point in my life, I hadn’t even thought about becoming a trainer. But something about that new, increased communication piqued my interest and would resurface in the years that followed.

If it weren’t for Dazzle, I would never have delved into behavior—how dogs learn, how to change behavior, how to create a Conditioned Emotional Response and more. And that would lead to an apprenticeship, a job and then a business.

So, next time you have a behavioral issue with your dog, look at it as an opportunity to expand your horizons and learn something new that you need to learn. It could turn out to be a gift.