As a family pet in the yard, when visitors come onto your property Standard Schnauzers don’t typically meet them at the gate with a tail wagging open invitation to come play ball. Our dogs can be quite loud and obnoxious about letting visitors know that they are considered unwelcome trespassers. Or let’s say you drive up to the pump at a gas station and your dog launches a barrage of barking, growling, and showing of teeth to the stranger at the pump next to yours. Not okay!
Left untrained, the Standard Schnauzer might not understand to which threats she should react, and which should not be part of her responsibility. But keep in mind that she’s displaying some inherent guarding skills that you might appreciate if ever came an instance when her protection was truly needed.
I tell most of my would-be puppy owners the story of the time my dog, Zoey, “saved me” from a man that intended to push his way into my hotel room. It’s a longer story better told in person, but the short version is that the man’s wife had left him and taken the kids with her, and he was sure she was hiding out at the hotel in which I was staying. He told me this as he placed a hand on my door and began to push it open so he could come inside and presumably search my room for his missing wife and children.
Zoey had been laying quietly while the man spoke to me, but then suddenly she flew across the room toward the door with a snarling growl that sounded like it was coming from a Grizzly Bear. It caused the man to jump back from the door and I slammed it shut and hugged my savior-dog before shakily calling the front desk.
My point in this story is that Zoey was never trained to be a protection dog, and she didn’t passively wait for me to issue an “attack” command. Her natural guarding skills told her it was time to protect.
That little real-life lesson taught me that I don’t want to suppress guarding behaviors to a state in which the dog no longer has the confidence to act on it. Instead, I work toward helping them understand in which situations their guarding skills are not needed or are unacceptable. Training takes a lot of time, repetitive practice sessions, and patience, but it’s important to understand that the guarding trait is something that should be honed to suit your preferences and circumstances, not eliminated.
As I recall this incident, I can offer two additional pieces of advice: 1) don’t underestimate the Standard Schnauzer as a guard dog. They may not have the body mass of a large dog, but attitude-wise they’re all business. And 2) don’t open doors without checking first to see who’s on the other side!