We have learned a great deal about ethanol preference drinking from the genetic animal model literature. Yet, as the field of the biology of alcoholism has co-evolved with that specialized in alcohol drinking studies, we must ask, what are the principal strengths and weaknesses of the phenotype, preference drinking, vis à vis compulsive human drinking? One approach to asking this question was taken by a review of the multitude of data from inbred strains and from lines selected for preference. Nearly all the selected lines were selected for essentially the same trait, two-bottle preference drinking. These authors asked whether the patterns of correlated responses for other measures of ethanol reinforcement seen across the divergently-selected drinking lines were similar. For example, did high preference-drinking genotypes also show a greater sensitivity than low drinking genotypes to alcohol's stimulus properties in conditioning paradigms, or would they work harder in an operant task to obtain access to alcohol (Green and Grahame 2008)? It is reassuring to find that the animals with high preference genotypes indeed would work harder in oral operant self-administration studies. Another
