How to Prevent Your Dog From Guarding Food

Teaching your dog to love people around his food bowl is the quickest way to prevent your dog from becoming a food bowl guarder.

It’s so much easier to prevent a problem than to fix one. Which is where this article and video come in. You won’t believe just how easy it is to get your dog to look forward to your approach when he’s eating.

Here’s the how to:

1. Have some chicken or steak handy, cut into tiny pieces.
2. Put your dog’s food in his bowl, then set the bowl on the floor.
3. When your dog is eating his food, walk by and drop some chicken into the bowl. Keep walking.
4. Come back through and drop a few more pieces of food into his bowl.
5. Continue randomly raining chicken into his food bowl while he eats.

Before you know it, your dog will be looking forward to your approach. You’ll probably notice his tail wagging, his expectant expression, waiting for those morsels to drop into his bowl. Not only will you teach your dog to look forward to your approach, but you’re preventing a a huge problem of resource guarding.

The old-fashioned (and dangerous) advice of: take the food bowl away from your dog to show him you can [seriously, who thinks this stuff up?!] may be well intentioned, but it’s likely to (1) get you bitten and (2) make the dog begin to guard his food from you.

This is pretty obvious, but let me be clear: do this with your dog to prevent resource guarding, not if your dog is already guarding his food (or anything else). If you have a resource guarding dog, call a veterinary behaviorist in your area. Do not attempt this exercise with your dog.