Fortunately this is not about Inara - I'm posting for a friend. J has a 6 year old spayed female pit/rott mix named Echo. She's had Echo since she was like 4 weeks old (took her from a BYB to save her as she wasn't eating). Echo is super great with people and kind of bitchy with dogs - we call her the "fun police."
Anyway, J has a baby who is about 8 months old. Up until recently, Echo has been great with him. A couple weeks ago though she growled at him when he crawled close to the trash can. She resource guards the trash can against the other dogs but had never done it with Porter before. So J began separating Echo whenever there was food of any kind around, whether it was dog food or people food. This seemed to solve the problem. However, last night, J and Porter and Echo and the 2 other dogs were lounging on her bed. Porter was just crawling around on the bed and Echo was curled up with J. Porter began crawling towards J and Echo growled and snapped at him. J was shocked and didn't really do anything as she wasn't sure she saw it right. But a few minutes later Echo growled and snapped at Porter again. J kicked the dogs off the bed and picked Porter up, then called me, very upset.
She feels she can no longer trust Echo. She's afraid that if Echo is resource guarding her, will Echo then snap at Porter if he's crawling towards J on the living room floor? She knows that if Echo wanted to bite him Porter, she could have, but she obviously doesn't want to push her over that bite threshold limit. She's devastated because she's afraid she may have to euth Echo because she can't trust her, yet she doesn't feel it's fair to keep her separated from the family for the rest of her life. Echo does not do well when J is not around - she refuses to eat and is just listless, so J doesn't think she could rehome her.
I'm loaning her money to have my trainer come out to her house for a behavioral consult. But what else can she do? I hate to see Echo PTS but I know that Porter's safety needs to come first. Thoughts or ideas???