Download Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals

Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals

Author: Visit Amazon's Karen Pryor Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0743297768 | Format: PDF

Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals Description

Review

" Karen Pryor explains positive training methods in an easy-to-understand manner that can be quickly learned by all animal lovers." -- TEMPLE GRANDIN, Ph.D., author of Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human

"Karen Pryor has been at the forefront of humane and science-based training for decades, and this book shows us why. With compelling stories and accessible science, Reaching the Animal Mind is an inspiration for everyone who loves animals and wants to train them with compassion and respect. Whether you're an experienced clicker trainer or someone who just wants their dog to stop barking without having to yell, you really, truly want this book!" -- DR. PATRICIA McCONNELL, author of The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs

"Karen Pryor explores new discoveries in animal learning, looks at old concepts with a fresh perspective, and tells a masterful story throughout. This book should fascinate the scientist, the trainer, and the casual animal lover all at the same time. Karen has always been a compelling storyteller, but this book truly caps off her amazing career. As an animal-care professional, I would put this on the required reading list for everyone who works with or cares about animals." -- KEN RAMIREZ, Shedd Aquarium, and author of Animal Training

"Karen Pryor shows how clicker training has solved problems that traditional training methods could not solve, or worse, that those methods caused. The clarity of her descriptions enables the reader to start basic clicker training right away. Moreover, the book helps readers gain awareness of their own ways of controlling others. Any time criticism, jerking, or punishing can be replaced with clicker-training methods, everyone benefits. The more that people follow the principles in this book, the better off the world will be." -- JULIE VARGAS, author of Behavior Analysis for Effective Teaching --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details
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Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Scribner; 1 edition (June 16, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743297768
ISBN-13: 978-0743297769
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

At least that's how I feel after reading this wonderful book! To be honest, I had no idea as to what this book might be about - I thought it might be about finding a way to communicate better with your pet (in my case, a very BIG cat, who is the one that really runs my home). I also thought that it might be one of those cutesy animal books that are often fun to read but lack any substance. Boy, was I wrong! Instead, I discovered what a tremendously exciting and wonderful world that the study of animal behavior (include humans) can be through the eyes of an expert in behaviorism, and the study of how behaviors can be developed, learned, and altered that goes back to the work of Pavlov and later Skinner. I digress, however, as I don't want this review to focus on the hard science behind this book as it is wonderful reading for anyone who is interested in animals (of any kind) and how they may be trained. This book will also greatly appeal to those who like fascinating (sometimes even a bit bizarre) and hilarious stories about how humans are learning to interact with animals and each other.

The author, Karen Pryor, is an expert on using behavioral techniques to train dolphins and began practicing these principles when she was unexpectedly recruited to train the dolphins at Sea Life Park (Hawaii) back in 1961. At that time, her only qualifications were that she happened to be married to one of the people who ran the park and no one else could get the dolphins to perform (remember, this was in 1961 when very, very little was known about training animals in the manner which is now used all over the world today).

Karen Pryor does a superb job of describing the "how" and "why" clicker training reaches the animal mind and gets results. She takes classical conditioning (that involuntary or automatic response to a stimulus such as a clicker) and turns it into operant conditioning whereby the animal learns to actively respond to that stimulus. During training you use a primary reinforcer (food, play) which is something the animal wants and is encouraged to work for to elicit the behavior. Also during operant conditioning a cue (such as a word or hand signal) is paired with the stimulus (clicker) and acts as a reinforcer as long as the recipient (animal or human) knows what it means and what to do. Over a period of time you use the clicker (and eventually the cue) and primary reinforcer to shape the behavior into what you want. If the conditioned response is not received, then withhold the primary reinforcer (for example, treat) until the expected behavior is repeated. However, you must remember never to cruelly punish non-behavior or force the desired behavior because you risk getting a fear response to your stimulus that can last forever. This explains why so many trainers and people fail in their training methods; it only takes one bad response on the trainers part.

The author provides many examples of where this training has worked and tells of how she has trained fish, a hermit crab, and other animals. She also gives a good example of horses that were impossible to load in a horse trailer becoming horses who loaded themselves. The trainer used the above techniques along with successive approximation which meant modifying the environment repeatedly to sequentially increase the difficultly of the task until it was similar to the environment the horses were afraid of.

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