guarding the water bowl

Question
Hello,I have a question about my four month old potbelly pig. Recently whenever one of our dogs goes and gets a drink of water out of their water bowl she will run to the bowl and try and chase the dogs away. Everytime she does this i correct her and when i tell her no she usually stops. but i was just wondering what would make her do this? she had been fine about sharing the water bowl but this past week she just started getting protective over it i guess you could say.How do i  go about  correcting this?
Thank You

Answer
There's a number of possibilities here. I am assuming that piggy always has access to her own supply of fresh water, and that is not the problem.

You called piggy "she", so if piggy is a little girl, and not yet spayed, then it's most likely she's experiencing her first heat. Piggies do all sorts of odd and unpleasant things while they are in heat. She may have decided that the dogs are her "mates", and this is how she's expressing it. If this is the case, she'll stop in a few days and everything will be back to normal for about three weeks, when the next heat starts.

Pigs in heat may also become aggressive or forget their potty training. This is not the piggy's fault, piggy is driven by hormones. It will escalate with each heat until piggy is about age 2, when she reaches full adulthood. The behaviors stop when piggy is spayed, and the hormones dissipate.

Another possibility is that she's trying to establish her place in her "herd". Pigs see the world as a ladder. Every person, pig or other animal has their own rung. Piggies naturally want to be as high up on that ladder as possible, and will challenge other household pets, and even their owners, to get there.

Conflicts between pig and dog can turn out very badly, usually for the pig. The only solution is to keep pig and dog apart unless there is a person present who can control the situation if a pig-dog dispute starts to get out of hand.

If the problem is a dominance dispute, then it won't go away in a few days, and may grow worse. Usually this kind of problem starts over a food dish instead of a water dish. Continue to tell her "no", and push her away from the dish. The difficulty here is that she may quickly start behaving when you or another person is present, but she may try harassing the dog again when nobody is around. So as a precaution, you might want to make a separate Piggy Place, like in a laundry room or closet, with a comfy bed and water dish and put piggy there when nobody is home to supervise her with the dogs.

I highly recommend Priscilla Valentines book Pot-Bellied Pig Behavior and Training. Pris really understands how pigs think, and why they do the things they do. She goes into much more detail about "pig-think" than I can here. Her book is available from Amazon.com

There's a list of vets that see pot-bellied pigs, and do spays and neuters, at www.farec.org.