Plus there are many, many, many,other thing I am shocked about that I have have been taught. SO MANY THING THAT I DON'T NO WHAT TO SAY OR DO.
ONLY BECAUSE THESE PEOPLE ARE EDUCATORS WITH A LOT OF EXPERIENCE & INFULENCES THROUGH THE WORLD.
I LOVE WHAT I HAVE LEARNED AND WHAT I'M LEARNUNG. NOW WITH BOTH I WILL JUST MEET IN THE MIDDLE & APPLY WHAT I HAVE LEARNED.

You really need to go to my web site and read the behavioral information there. Pay particular attention to the preface of the area where drives and character traits are named and defined.
You are correct that some years ago behavioral science stopped using the term "drive". It is a useless scientific term.
You cannot quantify a drive....so in a arena where quantifying everything is almost a mandate you can't play in that game. Though maybe you should look into qualitative research instead of quantitative research (for those with a background in hard science it would be a novel idea and would probably provide more insight into what we actually do in dog training). It would give more latitude for such things and probably would go further to explain the behaviors we toy with in regards to police dog training.
Right now, if you were to use the nformation you've been given you will have no tools or explanation for what we are producing with the dogs. It defies logic to throw out what we've produced because we haven't figured out why it works in accordance with "theory". Remember, for a long time the bumblebee shouldn't have been able to fly according to scientists. Finally, someone figured it out....in other words science caught up.
Science is a search for why. Not a denial of what is. Just because the old drive theory often seen in turn of the century observational behavioralists pulished works, which was brought into and modified for dog training is too cumbersome for quantification doesn't make it unusable for dog training.
Using drive is short hand for the things in a dog that dog traininers seek to identify, a grouping of behaviors that in dog training we cultivate or repress. To throw out the terminology does the endeavor of dog training no good. It would be like telling the mason that you cannot use the term cement because it doesn't represent the chemical componants of the material used and therefore cannot be used to quantify it. It would be like telling the weaver who dyes their own yarns that using a natural dye to produce yellow is wrong becasue the variability of the natural material is to great to quantify.
No one says that dog training is "science". It certainly is much more of an art or a craft than a science.
Science may explain some of the things we have experienced with dogs. But, science is much to far behind in respect to explaining what we have accomplished with dogs to use it to usurp the means of accomplshing what we do.
Are drives heritable? The things we identify as drives are, everything is heritable (a sociobilogical perspective). To say drives are not heritable is rubbish, to say that drives in and of themselves cannot be identified in the genome is absolutly true or to say they are a phenotype and not always representative of the genotype is also true. To say that expression of those heritable traits that dog trainers arbitrarily coin as drives is variable based on nurture is also true. But, these things are only loosly relavant in dog training, just highly relevant in regards to applying the scientific method in research.
Don't confuse the craft of dog training with the methodology of research. The net result is that you will not have a handle on either.

 Quote:

Originally posted by Kevin Sheldahl:

Don't confuse the craft of dog training with the methodology of research. The net result is that you will not have a handle on either.

AMEN!... Good post Kevin. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Yes kevin I understand. But you know it messes up my mind kind of. I stated befor that, what I have aways learned here is my way.Those were not my words.I am a natural too the ART OF TRAINING. But it going to be hard for me to change from how, they want me too exsplain things to people & too pass. Just the way I exsplain things.Never the way I train becuase I don't fall short in the ART on what I know.That sucks!.

I post this only because It bothers me & I wanna pass.. And too pass I must say & follow there theory.

Kevin, you've done it again! Excellent post!!! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

Ulysee, what school are you attending?

Terms are often used in very different ways in common and scientific dialect. That does not mean that the common usage is wrong, just that it is different. If people could only communicate in the same language used in scientific literature it would drive everyone nuts.

That said, sometimes science is wrong. By reading only articles from one perspective someone could get a very distorted view of the problem. Scientists disagree and will publish contradictory results, but without reading papers from both sides you can't get the whole story.

I have taken a course on animal behavior. It was interesting, but I can't say that I would trust some of the ethologists to walk my dog. Ethologists study animal's behavior in their natural environment. That's it. They describe this behavior in papers. Learning does happen in the wild, but there are more efficient methods. Would you pick up a pup in your mouth, carry it to its crate and vomit up dinner to teach the pup that this was him home? No. Instead we put a bowl of food in the crate and encourage the puppy to go in with happy sounds and food smells. It provides an interesting perspective, but this perspective must be modified to produce anything useful in practical terms.

<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

> Ethologists study animal's behavior in their
> natural environment. That's it.

What a coincidence. Virtually the same claim was made (by a dog trainer) on the Applied Ethology email list earlier this week.

An academic ethologist answered that this is not quite correct. He said while the goal of ethology is to learn about animals' natural behaviors, this is not always done in the animals' natural environments. Moreover, there are MANY things that ethologists have learned about animals' natural behaviors through animals' interactions with humans and in unnatural settings, that could not have been learned by field observations.

For example, the academic ethologist who addressed this question has studied the behavior of raptors (falcons, hawks, eagles) in part by being involving in falconry over the course of many years. Falconry not only involves a human working directly with a predatory bird (that's certainly not natural), but it also involves some training of the bird. This ethologist went further and said that animal training can be an excellent vehicle for studying ethology!

Incidentally, this ethologist uses the term "drive system" and calls it "the main motor for whatever you are setting out to do" in animal training.

Another example: ethologists learned things about the imprinting behavior of baby birds when they accidentally bonded with humans. How would things like the timing of this imprinting have been learned without setting up "unnatural" experiments?

Ethologists like Erik Zimen studied wolves' natural behaviors by observing wolf behavior both in nature and in captivity (Zimen's book "The Wolf" documents this... interesting stuff IMO).

I don't think it should be a major surprise to dog trainers that one can learn many things about the ethology of domestic dogs, about their "natural behaviors", by being involved in working dog training... things that could not be learned by field observations of feral dogs at garbage dumps. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Laura Sanborn

Minor point. It is not always in the natural environment, but that's certainly the "ideal" as it was presented to me. They are still studying the animal's natural behavior, and not how to modify it. They might be learning from viewing modification (depending on how obsessed they are with the difference between ethologist and psychology), but that is not their primary goal. Sure it has some use, but the amount of usefulness is certainly less than that of research on the direct modification of behavior from a trainer's perspective. It was my experience while taking a course that most ethological information has already been integrated into training either by accident or design because it helped the training. If I had to do it again I would have taken a psychology class on behavior modification instead (from a pure applications standpoint, I felt like I was taking a course that just told me why things were the way they were), although I have not taken any psych. courses to be able to make a comparison.

Again, I am not saying that it is useless or boring, just that from a training standpoint other approaches are probably more appropriate with respect to application.