My instinctual reaction to resource guarding is so different from my intellectual one :-/ I ploughed right through "Mine!" and tried to absorb every bit of what Jean Donaldson was, quite thoroughly, telling me to do...but when push comes to shove and Astro snarls at me over something I gave him ten minutes ago and need to take away (to redirect him to eating it on his mat, for example, rather than on the nice new couch), for some reason it feels like an insult. I get this rush of "oh no you did NOT!" and I want to challenge him on it.
It's super weird. This dog will never know what an alpha roll is, I find dominance theory pretty eye-rolling, but there's a part of me that, when I'm truly honest with myself, understands why people resort to that type of thing. You get offended, you feel like the dog needs to understand that what he did was not. acceptable. And yet I know it's yanking stuff out of his mouth on walks (thanks for being litter-tastic, NYC!) partially that's made him this way, and yanking stuff out of his mouth more is only going to be counterproductive.
I need to suck it up, carry kibble in my pocket, and start raining food down on him when I approach him with a bully stick again. I need to practice "drop" daily. His RG goes down SO MUCH when I do those two things regularly, to the point where he wags his tail when he sees me coming toward him while he's got something, but I forget or I think "he's gotten so much better!"...and then we wind up at today, where I casually reach over to take his bully stick away, and he stands up and snarls. He's never snapped at any living being, ever, but he's clearly a grump about it and he does escalate pretty rapidly unless I step up to the plate and work on it with him often.
Every now and then, I do wish he was an easier dog. Holy heck this 10 month old is serious business sometimes. I love him and he's such a mush in so many ways, but there are moments where I think "Wow, if I didn't bother to put training on him, who knows how he'd turn out..." He's not one of those dogs that I feel would turn out all right no matter what, and that makes me feel overwhelmed sometimes. I always knew my Sheltie was going to be a soft little sweetheart, no matter what we did, but Astro is not that pup.
/rant and stressiness.