When I first come across the posts from a professional trainer called Steve Courtney on the Dogzonline Training Forum, he asked the question 'Why buy a dog that is full of drive only to suppress that drive?'
Well, with that question, my curiosity was sparked!
I went on from there reading every word from every post that Steve Courtney had written and I come to see not only my dogs, but my approach to training in a whole new light.
Steve explained that using the dogs strongest drives as powerful motivators for their training creates a dog whose response to obedience commands is 'an adrenaline based subconscious reaction to stimuli' and produced '100% fast and enthusiastic compliance'.
Wow! Who wouldn't want a dog that could perform obedience like that. But there are many more benefits to this style of training. For example, a dog that has his or her strongest instinctive drives satisfied is a calmer, more emotionally balanced and healthier dog.
Also, instinctive drives inherently have their own learnt self control mechanisms built in because as you can imagine, a dog in the wild cannot expend too much energy engaging in drives where the source of the next feed is uncertain. So when engaging in drives, dogs learn to become more energy efficient and exact in the expression of the drive based behaviours.
Check out this scene from 'Eight Below' for an example of that.
Initially the younger Husky cannot contain his excitement at seeing a potential food source. How many times have you seen a puppy trying in an uncoordinated and impulsive way trying to catch something and failing? In subsequent attempts they slow down, prevent themselves from getting over excited and seem to put more thought into their efforts. In the scene above, the older Husky has already learned self control in her drives and delay peak drive until she is more likely to guarantee a catch. That is one of the magic elements of training in drive - not only does the dog get drive satisfaction, but he learns self control.
Things were very different for Marley though. As is common with most high drive dogs all of the methods used in his training were about him having to suppress his strongest drive, and that produces the fall out behaviours that you see him engage in in the movie. His freedoms are gradually taken away, his high energy is redirected into other nuisance behaviours like barking, digging and destroying things, and of course his health suffers. He was out of control and so his owners put more and more management and control measures in place not realising that his energy had to go somewhere.
One of the problems with management and control with a high drive dog that Steve points out is that there is a particular area of the drive sequence where the dog cannot hear you, and he doesn't record memories - that basically means that in this area of drive, the dog cannot learn!
But that can all be very different!
Have a look at the freedom Steve's dog Venom can be allowed in the video below. Remember instead of suppressing the dogs strongest drives, Steve has used those drives to train Venom. Venom's response to an obedience command is 'an adrenalin based subconscious reaction to stimuli' and Venom delivers '100% fast and enthusiastic' obedience to commands.
If you're anything like me, at around about this time, you're thinking back over some of the issues you've had with training your dogs and recognising that you could have done differently, and life with your dog could have been so much less stressful!
Added for clarity: After I finished writing this article I realised that I'd made an error. Where I mention 'drives' in the above, the drives referred to are the positive drives for survival. When a drive is labelled positive or negative, the label is referring to how the dog feels while they are engaging in that drive. So, even though the behaviours might look similar at times, the dog actually feels very differently if it is engaging in defensive aggression rather than prey drive. Defensive aggression, generally being a fear based behaviour, does not deliver the same drive training results as prey drive does. Fear based drives generally do not have the same kind of self control built into them as the positive drives for survival do.