@telldtruth Barking at strangers is an easy one! Grab a bone and get him to pick that up. Rub his butt and say "good bone!!" If he is doing stuff you don't like, chewing on a pillow, say, take the pillow away and say nothing, no yelling, no scolding, nothing. Then give the bone, then praise like crazy and butt rubs. Dogs often misbehave for attention, so don't give them any (negative attention is still attention to them). Show them they get happier attention and faster if they behave.
We have a supply of little rawhide bones and every time someone arrives for a party, he gets a bone right away. "Show them your bone, Taco!" And he still barks a little, but now he mostly runs over with his bone and awaits the butt rubs, and I clued all my friends in on not speaking to him if he is barking or whatever and only praising him and rubbing his butt if he is greeting them the right way. It took some time and practice of course.
The food guarding is a bit trickier, and you're not going to like how we fixed it (and it won't work for every dog). Our old man here has a very high metabolism and a lot of energy, and he just doesn't put on any weight, so we feed him a LOT. Any time he starts acting aggressive towards the cats or grumpy towards the baby, we feed him some hot dogs. When he is full, he's perfectly pleasant, so we keep him full.
Just like humans, dogs like having variety in their diet. We use Hills Science Diet for Large Dogs like you might use rice, as a base, and then we mix in a serving or a half serving of various meats and cheeses. Half a chicken breast and a tablespoon of cheddar, with a cup of crunchy food, for instance.
Another key is that dogs want to eat as a pack. When it's time for us to eat, everyone eats. We do have to put our puggle in the kitchen how that he has diabetes and has gone blind. He just follows his nose to whatever smells good, which sometimes is his brothers' bowls haha.
The last incident we had resulted from us over estimating how recovered our shepherd was, and not realizing how insatiably hungry our puggle would be. Puggle goes for the shepherd's bowl on a day where we had missed lunch, and the shepherd is super hungry, the shepherd snarls at the puggle, and the puggle doesn't back off like he usually would, but snarls back. The shepherd's aggression switch is halfway flipped, when the bulldog jumps across the room in between him and the puggle to tank any damage.
Our American bulldog does great fighting control. He bites hard right behind the ear so other dogs can't continue using their jaws and he waits until it's safe, as in, we have things under control, and then just let's go. So my shepherd had a gnarly bite that healed ok without stiches, and half his ear got torn off when we pulled them apart. He looks metal af, but he's still happy!
After this for a while he was quick to move out of the way, looking down and away a lot, scared to start eating, obviously anxious of his brother. So I just sat the shepherd down and reminded him the bulldog still loves him, and of course the bulldog is trying to lick and clean his wounds which the shepherd hates. I helped ensure he had space to recover, and slowly as the pain faded, so did the anxiety.
Since then, there has been 0 food aggression, even if we missed a meal. That was the final straw he needed to be totally calm about food. I reminded him of course that there is unlimited food in the kitchen, that I could have just gotten him more, and there'd be no pain right now, that kind of thing. Now, if he is nervous he might have a reaction, he won't even start eating until everyone else is out of the room or busy eating themselves.
So we had mostly solved it with abundance and variety, and the last piece was him realizing he can't win a fight against the bulldog, and the bulldog will protect the puggle. He realized then that he looks scary even when he doesn't feel scary, and now he has more self awareness of his issue.
I hope any of this helps! Happy to answer more questions and dissect this further, but of course, it's so long already, so I'll leave it for now.
