Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name - Softcover

Hearne, Vicki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1510704299 ISBN 13: 9781510704299

Verlag: Skyhorse, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

A groundbreaking meditation on our human-animal relationships and the moral code that binds it.

Adam's Task, Vicki Hearne’s innovative masterpiece on animal training, brings our perennial discussion of the human-animal bond to a whole new metaphysical level. Based on studies of literary criticism, philosophy, and extensive hands-on experience in training, Hearne asserts, in boldly anthropomorphic terms, that animals (at least those that interact more with humans) are far more intelligent than we assume. In fact, they are capable of developing an understanding of "the good," a moral code that influences their motives and actions.

Drawing on an eclectic range of influences—Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, Disney animal trainer William Koehler, and Genesis from the Bible, among others—Hearne writes in contemplative, exploratory, and brilliant prose as she interweaves personal anecdotes with philosophy. Hearne develops an entirely new system of animal training that contradicts modern animal behavioral research and that, as her examples show, is astonishingly effective.

Widely praised, highly influential, and now with a new foreword by New York Times bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler, Adam’s Task will make every trainer, animal psychologist, and animal-lover stop, think, and question.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vicki Hearne was an accomplished scholar of linguistics, literature, philosophy, and behavioral psychology as well as a poet. She was a professor at Yale University and operated a dog-training school for years in Westbrook, Connecticut.

Donald McCaig, the author of Jacob’s Ladder, Rhett Butler’s People, and Canaan. He and his wife, Anne, work a sheep farm in the western mountains of Virginia.

Karen Joy Fowler is a New York Times' bestselling author of six novels, including The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are Completely Beside Ourselves, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

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Adam's Task

Calling Animals by Name

By Vicki Hearne

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright © 2016 Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5107-0429-9

Contents

Foreword by Karen Joy Fowler, 
Introduction by Donald McCaig, 
Preface to the 1994 Edition, 
1. By Way of Explanation, 
2. A Walk with Washoe: How Far Can We Go?, 
3. How to Say "Fetch!", 
4. Tracking Dogs, Sensitive Horses and the Traces of Speech, 
5. Crazy Horses, 
6. Horses in Partnership with Time, 
7. Calling Animals by Name, 
8. The Sound of Kindness, 
9. Lo the American (Pit) Bull Terrier, 
10. What It Is about Cats, 
11. Rights, Autism and the Rougher Magics, 
Afterword, 

CHAPTER 1

By Way of Explanation

The impulse behind this book is specifically philosophical, which is a way of saying that the circumstances of my life have been such that it mattered enormously to me to find an accurate way of talking about our relationships with domestic animals. It mattered to me as a dog and horse trainer for what I hope are obvious reasons. When you are incoherent in your notions about an animal you are working with, things do not go so well with the animal, and an animal trainer is a person who can't help but be uneasy about such a state of affairs, whether or not s/he has the linguistic wherewithal to articulate the problem and the solution properly.

If I had remained firmly within the worlds of discourse provided by the stable and the kennel, I might have been content, not because there is no philosophy in those worlds, but because there is such a rich and ever-changing web of philosophies when good trainers talk and write. These philosophies remember and speak to their sources in the thought of the past and are, unlike the general run of philosophies, continually tested and either reaffirmed or revised, since the world of the genuinely good dog or horse trainer is one in which reality is quite clearly, as Wallace Stevens had it, "an activity of the most august imagination."

However, my temperament regularly led me away from the kennel and tack room to university libraries and cafeterias, laboratories and classrooms. The result was that for some years I uneasily inhabited at least two completely different worlds of discourse, each using a group of languages that were intertranslatable — dog trainers can talk to horse trainers, and philosophers can talk to linguists and psychologists, but dog trainers and philosophers can't make much sense of each other. (Philosophers and linguists may have sometimes thought that they found each other incomprehensible, but their quarrels were usually about the interior decoration of the house of intellect and not about fundamental structural principles.) Because I had learned to talk, more or less, in both worlds, I was intensely alert to the implications of Wittgenstein's remark, "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."

Here is as good a place as any to speak of the example that most clearly indicates the problem I set out to deal with. In Germany there was once a cart horse named Hans, owned by one Herr von Osten. Hans had to back the cart he pulled in a circular drive, and his skill at doing this, the story goes, so impressed von Osten that he decided that horses in general and Hans in particular must be smarter than generally supposed. Von Osten began doing various things with Hans, teaching him to respond to questions either by tapping with a hoof a certain number of times or else by indicating one of a number of blocks on which the alphabet was written.

Hans was a good learner, and in time philosophers, linguists and psychologists from all over came to test his acumen. It turned out that Hans could not answer questions if he could not see the person asking him. It turned out further that if the questioner was in sight, Hans could always find out what the questioner thought was the correct answer, no matter how hard the questioner worked at remaining still and impassive. Hans apparently read minute changes in breathing, angles of the eyebrows, etc., with an accuracy we have trouble imagining.

This led to von Osten's being denounced as a fraud, and he seems to have died an unhappy man, not so much on his own account as on that of the horse in whom he so deeply believed. And there has now come to be a technical term in academic studies of animal psychology, the "Clever Hans fallacy." This is the fallacy of supposing that an animal "really" understands words or symbols when what the animal is doing is "merely" reading body language. In the literature, this notion is used to discredit virtually anyone who disagrees with the writer in question as either a fraud and a charlatan or else as just plain credulous and stupid. There is an unhealthy air of triumph in the rhythms of the prose of the people who do this discrediting, and I have found myself moved to wonder why, if the trainers and thinkers who believe that Hans illustrates something more important are so discountable, they must be so often attacked.

I told a friend of mine, the poet Josephine Miles, the story of Clever Hans. She said, in response to finding out that the humans couldn't conceal from Hans what counted as the correct answer, "But isn't that interesting!" One of the points of this book is to say, "Yes, Jo, that is interesting." She is now dead, so I can't say it to her, but I can say that she would probably want me to explain that, of course, when I here and throughout the book take swipes of one sort and another at academic thinking, they are lover's complaints — if I didn't love the worlds of discourse we call intellectual and academic, I wouldn't care if things went well there or not.

One of the worlds I lived in when I first set out to address this problem was the animal trainer's world — the trainer of domestic animals primarily, although that world is not to be located by the boundaries of kennels, racetracks, horse-show grounds or obedience trials. The other world was the world of the intellectual, especially the academic or full-time intellectual, though it is not strictly bounded by the walls of either university or editorial offices.

What happened was that in the mornings I would get up just before dawn and work my horses. Generally I had finished with most or all of them (it depended on how business was going or whether certain horses were giving me trouble) by noon, so I would shower and go over to the local university. There were a couple of people there I liked to meet and talk with over lunch, and I also liked to prowl around in the library and either take courses in or just hang around courses in philosophy, psychology, zoology and linguistics. I had been bitten in my childhood by a passion for books, especially books that were, as a recent novel has it, "hard to read, books that could devastate and transform your soul, and that had a kick like a mule when you were finished with them." There were as many glittering and lovely creatures in those books and in the conversations of people who cared about them as there were in the kennel and the stable.

But despite their many beauties, most of the philosophers and their associates in the libraries, and all but two or three of the people at lunch, were profoundly disappointing, not in and of themselves, but in terms of my passion for a language with sufficient philosophical reach to tell me what I wanted to know about the stable and the kennel. And there was a great deal that tended to cause me to lose my temper, such as the enormous amount...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Skyhorse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1510704299
• ISBN 13: 9781510704299
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 296
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar