Let your puppy or dog eat in peace. You may have heard somewhere that you should be petting her, sticking your hand in the bowl, or even taking it away, just to show that you “own” it. These are all not only extremely annoying and stressful (has a server ever whisked away a dish before you were finished?), but worse, may teach a dog that you cannot be trusted around his food. This is how resource guarding often starts.

When I was a kid, we thought we were spoiling our wire-haired terrier Perri with a diet of Alpo. He got one can a day. But we noticed that he kept getting into garbage cans around the neighborhood. When I was older and smarter, I was horrified to realize that he'd been hungry because he just wasn’t getting enough, either in quantity or quality. We didn’t know any better, and options were few in those days.