A dog behaves the way you train it to, and you can’t expect much more than that.

Nevertheless, people come to think of their canine companions as their fierce protectors. “Beware of Dog” signs can act as deterrents (but mostly just so lazy thieves will move on to the next house), but plenty of bad guys know that when push comes to shove – quite literally – the family pet isn’t really all that scary.

In 2018, Inside Edition performed an experiment to see how often dogs would protect their owners.

Now, the problem was that we have no idea what “guard dog” training these pups ever received. So it should come as no surprise that when the same “fight or flight” mechanism that humans experience was activated in dogs during fake robberies, most of them chose flight.

Turns out your average dog is probably not going to put its life on the line with an intruder – in fact, they’re just as scared as you would be.

Three pet owners took part in the experiment (of course, 3 people isn’t enough to really teach us anything about the average dog, so calling it an “experiment” is pushing it. These aren’t scientific results.)

Experiment #1

First up was Michelle Kellaher from Irvington, New York and her yellow Lab named Perry. Kellaher hoped that her loving dog would step up to protect her, but she just didn’t know.

Two dog trainers, Michael D’Abruzzo and Nate Bonilla, from K9-1 Specialized Dog Training, were brought in to test Perry.

Michelle sat on the couch while Bonilla – who was wearing all black – burst through the door and faked an attack. She screamed.

How did Perry respond? By getting the heck out of there!

Experiment #2

Despite pitbull owners defending their dogs from critics, Kevin Peterson from Cortland Manor was convinced that his pitbull/Lab mix, Ruby, would attack an intruder.

But Ruby proved that pitbulls aren’t inherently violent. It’s all about how you raise a dog. She wasn’t taught to attack intruders – so she didn’t.

She did run up to the fake assailant, but she quickly got right the heck out of there.

D’Abruzzo told Peterson:

“Ruby was curious; she was worried about you, but she was not willing to take on the attacker. Sorry, Kevin. Ruby is a wimp.”

We’re not sure that’s fair – we’d say Ruby is smart!

Experiment #3

But do you want to know which dogs had the innate sass to confront the intruders conducting the experiment?

The tiny ones.

Ellen Eikamp from Scarsdale is the owner of Frodo and Dobby.

When she screamed out during her staged attack, those two tiny bada$$es came to her rescue.

Frodo immediately tried to get between his owner and the intruder, instinctively using a method called “splitting” to make the man in black back off. Dobby the chihuahua showed up to the fight too, protecting his mom.

There was no running away for these pups!

“Once they realized that something was wrong, they really both step up,” said the trainer.

Eikamp was proud of her little “guard dogs.”

“I like how they both worked together,” she said.

So does this mean the littlest dogs are the bravest? Well, we don’t know. They certainly had the most killer instincts of the dogs tested, but without knowing anything else about these pet’s pasts, we can’t be 100% sure.

And that means neither can you if you think your dog will protect you from an intruder. If you want a guard dog, train a guard dog.

Be sure to scroll down below to see the experiment in action.

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Source: Inside Edition via YouTube