Defense drive? Fight Drive? - Page 1

      When my female outs the prey item and the helper advances to retrieve the prey my female does a lot of barking. When a dog is doing this, the helper backs away, now is this defense drive? Play drive? Fight drive? Too many drives. 

 Surley you have a training director at your club, you should ask this question to that individual and get a explanation, by your description (vague at best) your training director should be able to help you understand drives. and easier to explain while th dog is working so you can understand.   

IMO (without actually seeing it happen)  your dog is doing prey guarding. The helper is backing off to build confidence,

Defense drive is the drive that comes out when the dog feels threatened, it is usually shown by posturig, hair up, snarling he is trying to tell you to stay away.  Fight drive is shown whenyou see a dog who takes the fight to the man.  This dog usually shakes his head while on the sleeve (not hectic re-gripping but full and hard bit)  This dog is confidence and it is shown by his actions.

What is hard for people to understand (beyond the actual definition of drive and how many "drives we put names to ) is that drives are fully intertwined. Good trainers and decoys "channel" between these drives to balance a dog out. By doing so you do not have a dog that works soley in prey or defense.

I would have to see what your trainer is doing when they agitate over the sleeve. But usually it is what I call "prey aggression". Prey aggression si displayed in two ways. When a dog chases it's prey it is locked in prey drive. If they catch it and the animal turns to fight, the dog goes into "prey aggression" which can than be channeled into "fight drive" if the prey animal is of sufficent size to offer a decent fight to challenge the dog.

Prey aggression is also displayed when something (in the wild another animal) is trying to steal the prey the dog has captured. This is the psycology and outward behaviour you see when the decoy challenges the dog over the dropped sleeve. Now if that challenge becomes too much, the dog can than channel over into defense drive. For example lets say in the wild the dog catches it's prey and the animal trying to steal the prey is a coyote or a fox. the dog will show prey agression which will generally drive the inferior opponant away. Let's switch the challenging animal to a bear. The dog will show prey aggression in an attempt to keep his dinner. If the bear continues to advance on the dog, the dog will then switch into defense mode. If that outward display doesn't work, the dog will take flight to avoid becomming the bears dinner.

What you have to rememeber is all drives and outward displays of these drives are based on self preservation.