Good Boy/Bad Boy

Yesterday, Larry was the absolute best dog he could be. C was very sick with food poisoning and that combined with some other things going on prevented us from being able to take the dogs to the dog park or even for anything longer than the 10 minutes walk I take the dogs on in the morning.
Larry very much seemed to get that C was sick. He spent most of his day actively cuddling with him, and in the evening, when he would usually be going crazy with pent up energy, he still managed to stay mostly calm and cuddled with us.

However, in another sense, Larry is becoming worse behaved. He has started actively resource guarding our resources (not even his, but ours) from June. There are days when he goes after her for tying to go in the kitchen while we’re cooking or food is out. Other times, he’ll go after her for approaching us while we’re eating.
And this really is about our food. He doesn’t resource guard his food- that’s not quite true, if I try to feed only one of them (usually June because she didn’t finish her food earlier in the day) there can be an issue. But normally, they each get their food. They both happily eat their food, and then when they’re both done, she wanders over to his bowl to lick it out and he wanders over to her bowl to do the same and no issues.
When we are handing them treats, they both want the “first” treat, but there is no resource guarding behavior.
So, it seems to come down to times when he thinks she might get something that he’s not going to get. But here’s the thing- we don’t feed either dog off our plates. They don’t get human food at all (except for all natural peanut butter when they get pills). So it’s not like he’s ever seen her be fed from our plates and not gotten anything himself. He gets told “no” and she gets told “no”.
We don’t want to have to lock the dogs away while we’re eating or cooking, so we’re trying to proactively deal with this.
Larry gets praised when he is lying (or sitting) quietly while eat. He gets praised regardless of where June is. If he starts to react to June moving around, we try to intervene before it escalates. Sometimes, though, it happens too fast, and we’re left with setting our food aside (very quickly) to pull them apart and get him calmed down.

This is an issue we’ll get solved. It will just take time and patience. Larry hasn’t even been with us a year, yet, so maybe he’s still not as confident of his place in the “pack” as he needs to be. It took years to work through Smokey’s submissive peeing problem, so I don’t expect this to go away instantly. We just have to be more vigilant, more proactive, and really work on our sit/stays.