What is resource guarding?
Turns out that’s a harder question to answer than I had anticipated. If you’re really interested in the minutiae of terminology around dogs using behavior to control access to resources, this paper will probably do the trick. For our purposes, resource guarding is just what I described, the behavior patterns that dogs use to control access to items of value.

Dogs are usually much better spotting the body language signals and behavior patterns other dogs use to maintain access to a resource…but that doesn’t prevent conflicts from happening between dogs. In general, I think that unless there is a big fight or a lot of household conflict between dogs, humans mostly worry about resource guarding when it’s directed at them.