Here’s a well-known video. The GSD’s owners claim that their dog is being “protective” over the lobster “because she’s never had puppies of her own”.
This is, frankly, nuts. Lobsters don’t smell like puppies. Lobsters smell like food. Dogs don’t spontaneously adopt food items as surrogate babies. What’s going on here is resource guarding.
Everybody in the room wants to eat this poor lobster. Possession is 100% of the law in a dog’s mind, and this dog is 100% invested in keeping the tasty lobster to herself. She’s worried about it being taken from her, so she’s communicating to the other dogs that if they try any funny business, there will be consequences.
Resource guarding is a potentially dangerous behavior that needs to be addressed with management and humane training, because other dogs and people in the house could get hurt.
Worse still, it’s likely the lobster is having a pretty bad time itself. They do feel pain, and being outside its natural environment and subject to the dog’s “mothering” is probably pretty unpleasant.
So it’s not just mistaken, it’s dangerous and cruel to shellfish. A triple whammy of nope.
Such an ingenious combo of cleverness and compassion with a healthy dose of reality.
ReplyDeleteBeing the owner of a dog that resource guards I remember seeing this video for the first time and thinking to myself "we really are clueless when it comes to dog behavior, aren't we?"
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for this blog. It's so easy to just share videos without realizing and/or caring about what the actual circumstances behind it are.