Reactive Dog – Resource Guarding

Hi guys. This is my first time posting on Reddit, but I seriously need a second (and third and fourth) opinion. Honestly, just a space to word vomit as my reactive dog has taken over my life. I am not very straight to the point so feel free to skim or just get to the main paragraph of this.

We have a reactive dachshund (about to turn 3), who as a puppy was for the most part great, but exhibited a small amount of reactiveness and resource guarding towards me and my boyfriend. This was very manageable until he turned 1 (he got neutered around the same time, it used to feel correlated but idk anymore ), the aggression escalated to serious bites and now strangers have been victim to this. He also developed dog reactivity but that is not the point of this post. I also want to make it clear that this is not his default setting. He is such a love 80-96% of the time. The issue is that when the switch flips, we understand the “a to b” of his reactiveness half of the time, but the other half is totally random, like a lot of one offs.

To preface: I was in over my head with this dog. I grew up with dogs my whole life (all mixed breeds), and somehow lucked out with them having the easiest personalities. So I definitely did not fully understand what having a more demanding breed entails. Obviously as his reactiveness presented itself, we tried locking in to training and ran the gamut on various methods. Boarding, multiple trainers, general obedience classes, positive reinforcement, Prozac (he is off it now), e collar training(which he is currently on), agility classes, etc. All of these have helped, some more than others, and he has made great strides if different aspects of his life. Despite this, he still has bursts of reactiveness, in varying levels. We did see a behaviorist who believes he has rage syndrome, which she says is usually from bad breeding. A lot of what she says about this makes sense, but I also believe that we have also contributed to his reactiveness unknowingly. There were things I missed as an owner and I take full responsibility. We could’ve worked on disciplining more/started training earlier/just doing more. Hindsight is 20/20.

More context: My dog has bitten 8 people, including myself and my boyfriend. We were reaching a dangerous level of hopelessness, as his bites kept escalating, we were always on guard and scared about taking him outside, and we were essentially scared of him in general. He was definitely running our life, and we did not know what to do.

More context: We found a well known dog trainer who had a history of working with reactive dachshunds with a biting history. The training involves the e collar. And yes I understand the consensus of e collar training here, and believe me if I could go without doing it I would. This is literally our last hope,(We’ve talked about rehoming him, but we love him so much and know that many places will not take him with his record, and he does not deserve to have an uncertain future.) Honestly our trainer is so great and so knowledgeable with this whole thing. Regarding our e collar training- we pair a e collar correction with our “No” command, as the desired outcome is to be able to say no without the added correction (still in the early stages of the whole e collar training).

More context (sorry I want to give a full picture): I will say, since taking him off Prozac and using the e collar training along with a very structured schedule, we have seen a positive change in him.

MAIN POINT: Anyway, I have a resource guarding question. He has classic reactive responses to high value treats, and is good at the “leave it command” for lower value/non food items. There’s a specific scenario tho with high/medium value treats that’s leaves me confused. For example, we were at my mom’s sleeping over and my mom gave him a yak chew (medium value treat). All great, he was running around with it as we were seated on the sofa. He eventually came to us with the treat and sat at our feet, very calm to the point I was giving sporadic pets to work on his reactivity. I got up to grab something, and when I sat back down he growled like 5 seconds later and took his treat to the corner of the room. I did not look at him, touch him, anything of the sort. After that I traded him for the chew with a round of find it’s with . But this is not a new occurrence. Like at home I’ll give him a no hide bone (high value), something he can chew on for a while and I’ll give him space, but often times like 15 min later he’ll come up and sit right next to me on the sofa chewing the sofa and will let me pet him and sometimes leaves the treat next to me while he gets water and then will come back very normal. Other times, he’ll be in his dog bed with the treat and if I walk by close-ish, he’ll give me whale eye and sometimes a growl and on the extreme occasions, will immediately lunge and bite. This has been going on before the e collar training and after.

Does anyone have any insight on this? Like why is he doing this? Anything is welcome, and like should I get up and remove myself and try to get him to eat his treat in a designated place, or is it good that he feels comfortable going ham on his treat next to me/sometimes on me? We spend a lot of time together since I’m wfh, so should I be creating more distance from him?

Any opinions or tips are welcome, truly I want to be the best I can for this dog. Also sorry for being long winded and any grammatical errors, I’m writing this at 4am and there’s so much I want to say.