Hey, guys, it's Hannah Branigan back with another episode of drinking from the toilet,

where we get real nerdy about real dog training.

This week, we continue our series on

reinforcement by talking about food drive. Now, you know I thought long and hard about it before

I used the word drive in the title of this episode. Because of course, drive can be a pretty

fuzzy word. Lots of people will use it in a lot of different situations

and with different meanings. Sometimes it's helpful in describing what we're talking about,

and sometimes it just makes it fuzzier. So I think it's important if we're talking about

any kind of driver in any context that we define it. So, you know, one of the

questions that I always have where I run across or that I have when we're having conversation

using these kinds of words is we have a tendency to either treat drive as a fixed characteristic.

So the dog is either high drive or low drive, depending. Or it's something that's

changeable and dynamic. We can build drive or we can squash drive. And of course, I tend to come down

on the side of there's a lot we can do to influence it because, of course, I kind of have to

in order for us to train it. It's the only place where we

have any room to grow. So that's the angle that I come from. But of course, of course,

genetics and biology have a place here. There is a difference between how the ease of reinforcing

Larry the Labrador, right, compared to Sally the Saluki.

I don't know.

I just made those up and I kind of want to go back and re-record this.

But anyways, there are dogs that seem to come to the table with more interest, more energy,

willing to put more out in order to get access to the same food source than other dogs. And whether it's

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