Resource guarding

I’m a bit confused, but I hope I understand the purpose of this community and that I can post questions here. I see that so far the topics are all started by Suzanne or Alyssa. I’m so excited to be a member here and hope I am not starting off on the wrong foot! I have been wondering how I could have handled this situation for awhile though. A couple years ago I was fostering a dog, a German Shepherd/Great Pyrenees/Maremma (according to DNA) mix female. I was told she got along with other dogs, which was important to ,me because I have a senior female Pug. The first couple of days went ok other than Nala (the foster) wanted to attack my goats. She couldn’t get to them but she wanted to. I was told she took awhile to warm up to people, but while she was here she was very friendly to everyone she met right away. Within a few days she started trying to go after my Pug. I was able to grab her leash and keep her from hurting my Pug, and it seemed like she didn’t really want to hurt her but did want to warn her to stay away from her. My Pug mostly just naps and ignores other dogs, so I don’t think she was provoking Nala in any way. Within another few days she was almost unmanageable and seemed to want to hurt my Pug (she was putting teeth on her). The problem, as far as I could tell with my limited experience) was that she was resource guarding both me and any toys she had access to. I fed them separately but I’d give Nala a food-stuffed Kong in a crate while I fed my birds because Nala would try to push into the aviary (a walk-in indoor aviary). It got to the point where if my Pug walked into the living room where the crate was, Nala would become extremely reactive. Once she growled at me while I was letting her out of the crate so I threw a treat for her outside the crate so that I could get the empty Kong out of the crate. It got to the point where I had to remove every toy, indoors and out, to keep Nala from attacking my Pug. She found a toy I missed outside while mu Pug and I were inside, and she ran inside to attack the Pug. I just didn’t know how to deal with this behavior and a rescue found someone to adopt her. I was fostering for the county shelter but they allowed me to let this rescue help me find someone to adopt her. The adopters ended up returning her because their mother-in-law moved in with them and they said Nala nipped at her. This was very surprising to me because she never showed any behavior like that with me.

So, my question is, how would you help a dog showing what seemed to me to be severe resource guarding? By the time she was adopted she seemed to be resource guarding me as well, as she’d try to attack the Pug if she walked anywhere near me. After the adopters decided they didn’t want her, the rescue asked if I’d take her back to foster but I just didn’t feel I could manage the situation at all. At the time I had injured myself and was in a wheelchair and I had also taken on another foster dog. I felt so guilty about not being able to help Nala, and also about leaving the rescue to deal with her. I still wonder to this day what I could have done to give Nala a better outcome. I don’t know what happened to her after the adopters returned her to the rescue.

Cindy