- Apr 19, 2013
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Thank you BOTH for continuing this discussion. I'm sure I'm not the only one still following!
Since you've gone into the area of dogs, I wanted to chime in. I strongly disagree with the statements in red. Not sure about chickens, but with dogs you HAVE to attempt to understand the motivations behind behavior. For two solid reasons:
1. You cannot possibly know ALL the variables that could affect the behavior you are observing. Sometimes you can identify a simple cause/effect chain of events in behavior (I said "sit." My dog knows the command, "sit," therefore she sat.) but that type of logic assumes you are aware of every single antecedent that could possibly have caused the behavior. To try to boil it down to just antecedents/consequences based on your observations of behavior - that's simply impossible, especially when dealing with animals. The best example I can think of is pain. Dogs don't always demonstrate they are in pain in ways that are easily recognizable to people. If the behavior I observe is sudden snarling and I don't know it's because she has an obstruction (because I didn't know she ate a rock yesterday), any "consequence" I apply to correct the snarling will be pointless.
I think we are probably more in agreement than you think. You don't need to understand the motives of an animal--the why--you just need to know what triggers the behavior and what keeps it going, in other words. You don't need to know why, but by observing the behavior and changing things, you will get an understanding of why.
2. Attempting to understand motivation is essential when attempting to correct behavior in an animal. This part of our culture bothers me. We are a punishing culture. We approach changing a behavior as "correcting" the learner instead of teaching the learner the what to do. Don't take my comments personally--it is part of our culture. Now, is a dog thinking deep, philosophical thoughts that you need to figure out? No. But you need to understand WHY your dog does something in order to find an appropriate consequence (for you OR your dog) for its behavior. Actually, you don't need to know why. All you need to do is observe and find out what consequences change the behavior. Otherwise it is purely a shot in the dark that your consequences will work. Sort of, but if you are really observant, you will see the behavior start to happen before it gets really obvious. They may be corrective, but may not actually solve the problem. For example, let's say my dog chews up my shoe. There are a number of corrective actions I can take, depending on what method or voice of authority I choose to listen to. Let's say I'm lucky & catch the dog in the act, so I yell/scold. Maybe I'm really lucky and the dog connects my scolding with his chewing. But will that necessarily stop the behavior? Not unless I understand WHY - the motivation for the shoe chewing. Was the dog bored? Hungry? Had it been left alone too long and was lonely? Was the leather in the shoe too similar to rawhide and the dog couldn't tell the difference? Maybe my previous yelling has backfired and the dog chewed the shoe to seek attention. All of that speaks to motivation. Unless you want to truly correct a behavior and prevent it from occurring again you have to make some attempt to narrow down the variables in play. Observation alone won't get you there. Certainly you have a point, but in general putting motivations on an animal doesn't get you very far. It really doesn't matter why, only the trigger that starts the behavior and the consequence that keeps it going. Observation will help you tease out the variables. In your dog scenario, four different owners of four different dogs might ascribe completely different motivations to the exact same behavior, chewing the shoe. One might say the dog is out to punish them and does it out of spite. Another might say the dog is bored. A third might say the dog has a strong drive to chew things. Yet another might say the dog does it because it is so neurotic, it chews up the shoe because it has separation anxiety. Any of the above might be correct, but does it matter? The problem is the dog chews a shoe. Stick with the behavior and what changes it.
I write all this because somewhere in here someone talked about a rooster attacking new boots that had a yellow line on them. After the yellow line was blacked out with a sharpie, the rooster's aggression stopped (if I'm remembering that right). Logic implies that the yellow on new boots was the antecedent. In other words, the yellow ticked off the rooster. You have to see that as motivation, otherwise physically correcting the rooster for aggression won't work. Understanding the motivation sometimes allows YOU to correct YOUR behavior, thus changing the environment to change the animal's behavior and in that particular case case avoid potentially abusive corrections altogether. I don't think the yellow actually is the motivation--it's the stimulus, the trigger, that sets the behavior in motion. Did he attack the yellow line because it triggered some primal response to a snake? Did he hate yellow because of something in the past? Who knows. It doesn't matter. All that matters is observing closely enough to figure out that the trigger for the behavior was the yellow stripe on the boots.
Just my two cents based on years of working with dogs. That said, I'm brand new to chickens. Most of the time I can't even begin to figure out what their crazy behavior means!
). As I mentioned in the previous post, the roo had never exhibited `overt' aggression. As a cockerel he'd rush me from behind if I was carrying something in both hands (bucket & a chunk of straw), but not just one hand (bucket). He'd always trot past and not actually hit me. That was the extent of his `flock management of humans' behavior. 
