Abilities of Canine Shelter Behavioral Evaluations and Owner Surrender Profiles to Predict Resource Guarding in Adoptive Homes

Some shelters in the United States consider dogs identified as food aggressive during behavioral evaluations to be unadoptable. We surveyed adopters of dogs from a New York shelter to examine predictive abilities of shelter behavioral evaluations and owner surrender profiles. Twenty of 139 dogs (14.4%) were assessed as resource guarding in the shelter. We found statistically significant associations between shelter assessment as resource guarding and guarding reported in the adoptive home for three situations: taking away toys, bones or other valued objects; taking away food; and retrieving items or food taken by the dog. Similarly, owner descriptions of resource guarding on surrender profiles significantly predicted guarding in adoptive homes. However, positive predictive values for all analyses were low, and more than half of dogs assessed as resource guarding either in the shelter or by surrendering owners did not show guarding post adoption. All three sources of information regarding resource guarding status (surrender profile, shelter behavioral evaluation, and adopter report) were available for 44 dogs; measures of agreement were in the fair range. Thus, reports of resource guarding by surrendering owners and detection of guarding during shelter behavioral evaluations should be interpreted with caution because neither source of information consistently signaled guarding would occur in adoptive homes.