Customer Reviews

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

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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). Not only did Pryor appear to be extremely adept at training the dolphins but has since devoted her life to training both animals and people on the wonderful techniques she developed using (now) highly accepted and valid scientific principles. Pryor not only documents some of the extraordinarily funny and humorous experiences she's had (you've got to admit that training your son's pet hermit crab to ring a bell when it wants some food is a bit, for lack of a better term, just plan bizarre) and provides extraordinary insight into how exiting working with animals, of all kinds, really is.

After picking up this book, I literally have not been able to put it down (except to get a little sleep) and laughed throughout the entire experience. As an added bonus, Pryor does practice something she preaches - she makes learning fun! Getting back to that "dirty word" - science - the book is filled with it and yet I've never read a book, on any "scientific topic" that was able to get around all of the dry, boring material one might expect and embed it in a richly filled treasure tome of plain good fun. After reading this book, I wish I had pursued a career of animal training 30 years ago. Not only is Pyror's prose great fun to read, but the science behind it is also terrific! If science and psychology teachers are wise (and many of them are not), books like Pryor's should be required reading on the topic of behaviorism.

I've just returned from the store and have purchased a "clicker" - perhaps I'll start training my @#% cat to give me a "high five" this afternoon. Even if she doesn't learn (and, after reading Pyror's book, I'm sure she will), this book was a real joy to read and I would highly recommend it to everyone.

UPDATE - Okay, so I just posted this an hour ago. My cat and I had our first training session - she'll be eight in a couple of weeks and let's just say that I'm OLD :) I recently bought a couple of cans of "kitty tuna" (VERY cheap tuna packaged just for cats) - which smells horrible and looks even worse. Just the same, I finally cut our session off as I was losing my concentration (she wasn't). Well, I've already taught her how to sit and she's already raising her right pay in order to "give me five." Wow! This is REALLY too cool! Way to go Prior and way to go "Little Miss Fatso" (one of my cat's "nicer" names)!

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.

This type of conditioning is also used on humans in training situations such as gymnastics, on autistic or disabled children, and others to elicit desired results. However, for humans this type of conditioning is called tagging. TAG (teaching with acoustical guidance) is the EXACT same technique as clicker training but is a euphemistically acceptable term to those who object to the idea that humans are being clicker trained.

The videos available for viewing on her web site that are referenced throughout the book were not available at the time of this pre-release edition; although a wonderful introductory video was available for review.

Reaching the animal mind is a succinct and effective book on how to achieve positive behavior changes in both animals and humans.

`Reaching the Animal Mind' far surpasses what I expected when I ordered a book to help me get my dog to stop barking. While It has what I was looking for (thank you very much), it also has much, much more.

Pryor's book should be required reading for any animal trainer, veterinarian, zoologist, pet owner or anyone else who interacts with animals on a regular basis. She clearly explains the principles and methods of operant (AKA `clicker') training and cites many examples of how the desired behavior was achieved. Her examples, each with a step-by-step description of how it is done, includes training an entire kennel of barking dogs to sit quietly in their cages, teaching six dolphins to leap out of the water and spin in perfect synchronization, and even to teach a hermit crab to ring a bell.

Another excellent feature about this book is the presence links to online slideshows and videos that demonstrate some of the techniques described in the book.

While not many people are interested in training hermit crabs the point is that the same basic techniques can be used to train just about any animal to do, or not do, just about anything. I was able to successfully teach my dog to catch and retrieve a frisbee using Ms. Pryor's techniques so I can personally vouch for their effectiveness. I highly recommend this book.

This is a vine review, I picked this book becuase I am a professional dog trainer of 20 years, and well acquainted with clicker training,and some of Karens previous works.
First, the cover is misleading,this is not a book about dog training.
This is a life, literture review of the lessons Karen has learned in her long and interesting life training, mostly dolphins .
I suspect Karens major money source in life right now is her dog training francishe, but her heart is really still with dolphins, not dogs.If you had read, Don't Shoot the Dog, twenty some years ago, then this book is a much better, rewritten version, minus dogs.
If you are new to clicker work and looking for a dog training book,then skip this book and buy a book by a dog trainer. Clicker work is wonderful, and I use it, but dolphins and dogs are not the same animal,an issue Karen glosses right over.
Once I realized this was a life review I settled down and enjoyed it. the stories are interesting. In the hands of a brillant, inuitive trainer, the clicker is a stunning tool for fast work and amazing change in behavior.
My last objection to the book is Karens writing style is just as plodding as mine, a bit slow to read, yes she has published lots of books, but after 20 years maybe her editor could find someone to give her some help to make her manuscripts read a little less like a PHD dissertation .

I am an industrial safety trainer. I was trained as a public school teacher, but never did it. My wife taught elementary school for two years. My daughter and my sister both trained as special ed teachers, but never did it. I have "trained" four hunting dogs over a period of 45 years to hunt with me.

I knew next to nothing about clicker training when I picked up this book. I thought I knew something about training. This book convinced me lots of what I knew was how to make training more difficult.

The book itself is a lesson in learning/training. Small bits, repetition that stops while it is still interesting, not boring. REAL illustrations via links to online video demonstrations of what the author describes. A chain of bits that build to a very persuasive structure that caused me to step back while reading the last chapter and just say WOW! Behavior changes can be done without tyranny or painful (physical or emotional) punishment.

Other reviews will give you the outline of the chapters. The title says "animal mind" Can you tolerate acceptance that people are animals? Why should a technology developed with animals--tiny, fish in a home aquarium, caged but wild wolves, lonely elephants in a zoo-apply to the much more complex being that is man? Well, Karen Pryor, will tell you why, if you can read it with an open mind.

I have long been suspicious of the "Alpha pack leader" approach to dog training. This book will tell you of a better way. The sad part is the passing comment that sport coaches rarely even consider this method. Pryor gives examples from gymnastics and golf of how the traditional method is so inefficient an clicker traing can get the desired result quickly. But the coaches prefer to stand and scream threats and insults at the trainee. Is there something basically sadistic in the souls of most coaches?

This book explains why small children love to learn and why by the time they get out of the public school system, most think it was all a wasteful experience and hope to never need to read a book again. This country needs TAGers in every classroom. And I don't mean kids with spray cans.

When I was around 11 years old, I browsed the stacks in my local library for a book about dolphins. Among the books I took home that day was Karen Pryor's Lads Before the Wind : Diary of a Dolphin Trainer, her account of her instant transition from the boss' wife to the head trainer: a few weeks before the grand opening of Sea Life Park in Hawaii, the original hired trainers were gone, and there were no new ones to be had. Pryor, the only person in the group with animal training experience (she'd had dogs and ponies) was given a thick binder of instructions, some porpoises, and a whistle, and an impossible deadline. Through persistence and trial and error, they pulled it off.

At first her memoir frustrated the young perfectionist me, because I wanted to read about the atlantic bottlenoses I'd seen, not these strange pacific porpoises... but not only did I read it cover to cover, I checked it out again and again. That she told not only of successes but of failures was deeply informative. It made a profound impact on how I related to animals, even if I didn't exactly use what would later be called "clicker training" myself. When I found a copy in a used bookstore as an adult, I marveled at my good fortune, jumping up and down at my find, and I've been able to reread it many more times. I was surprised and pleased to discover that in fact it was still in print, and bought copies for friends. I have been recommending it to other horsemen for years as one of the best animal training books anywhere.

When I found this new book, I could hardly wait to read it.

The opening chapters of this latest work retell some of the same anecdotes from Sea Life Park, and at first I worried that this would just end up being a rework of that earlier memoir, perhaps with some new anecdotes blended in. To see Pryor's work making life better for zoo animals and their keepers is a true pleasure; indeed, I've seen this for myself in zoos without realizing that this was becoming an organized conventional wisdom for working with animals deriving from her work - training them to present a wing, to walk from one location to another, to follow a target, and perhaps most importantly, to communicate back with their keepers. The training gives both animals and keepers more control and more fun in their environment. How many people know you can train a fish to jump through a hoop, or that a fish will sulk if it doesn't get the reward it deserved?

By the second half of the book, Pryor (who has many scientific papers to her credit) is relentlessly looking for the science. She knows that it works, and in a wide range of species. But why does it work? They do experiments comparing the use of the clicker to the use of a voice marker for training dogs, and to my surprise, the clicker is hugely more successful. (We humans do babble on.) She seeks answers from neuroscientists, finds dead end after dead end until finally she finds the group who knows exactly what is going on, and is surprised that everyone didn't know that a clicker event marker goes straight to the amygdalia - what I personally think of as the "lizard brain", where all our instinctive reactions are stored. The same instant and permanent learning that occurs that keeps you from putting your finger in the fire a second time is occurring with clicker training. A click is information, and all brains are wired to crave information.

She finishes up with applications of the clicker technique - truly a new training technology - to humans. Human gymnasts can be told that handstands must be vertical, but when they're upside down, they don't know where vertical is at first. A clicker - with the term changed to audible tag - can be pressed exactly at the vertical point with more precision and in less time than the coach can say, "there!" And human brains, hearing a click rather than trying to do the sensory processing to follow the words, can take a snapshot of exactly what that felt like right then and repeat it. Tagging can be used to help highly tuned and motivated athletes by both breaking down a skill into very small pieces and by giving very precise nonverbal information. And, of course, this means it can have value in other situations, where people speak different languages or who have no language.

In the appendix, there are a multitude of references, including pointers to online videos of some of the training incidents reported, and some simple shaping recipes to teach a cat to give a high-five, and a dog to touch a target. I appreciated how they were broken down into very small details, down to practicing your hand coordination beforehand to know that you can click the clicker when you mean to, and present food tidbits without fumbling.

This is an outstanding work that is certain to become a classic. I'm looking forward to buying copies of this book for my friends, too.

This book has been a joy to read. It has been both entertaining and informative and has given me all the ammo I need to continue training my two new pups. We have a 5-month-old doberman mix and a 3-month-old purebred golden retriever, both who have completed an 8-week basic obedience class. While our dobie has been a dream, our golden has been very flippant and hard to keep engaged in the training. After reading through this book, I immediately put my new knowledge to work and my golden who was previously struggling with house training is now completely potty trained and is actually surpassing her brother in all her basic obedience. This book really gives you insight into why animals, all animals, not just dogs and cats, behave the way they do and how to best communicate with them. I honestly in some sense feel like it's a bit of magic as it's made a night and day difference in the training of my pup. I'm so glad I picked this up! My husband is reading through it now as well and is enjoying it just as much as I have. Highly recommended.

An interesting but frustrating book. The author has had a long career "clicker training" ie. selecting and reinforcing specific behaviors of various animals. It is a rambling review of her experiences with info on clicker training, the theory and practice. Not a practical book for someone intending to use clicker training but a good book to create enthusiasm for the technique which has been used with dogs, cats, horses, rodents, humans, birds, fish, etc. Could use much better editing as the author rambles and repeats herself. As an autobiograhy it reveals a fascinating life and gives fascinating examples of the success of the technique. It is clear that to use the method to eliminate negative behaviors in animals requires a sophistication of technique that the beginner just won't have.

Unfortunately there do not seem to be any detailed DIY clicker training books available that teach more than the basics .

Karen Pryor's method of dog training is effective, and I strongly recommend it for any new dog owner or novice dog trainer. It is a solid how-to manual in positive reinforcement dog training. It is not without its shortcomings, however, and most of these are related to Pryor's own ego. Pryor spends a lengthy amount of time defending the notion that she is a "scientist", despite her lack of a Phd or formal training. I have no problem with this...but if you are going to call yourself a scientist instead of a dog trainer, then you should expect to be judged as such.

On a scientific level, this book does not hold up. Anthropomorphic accounts of animal behaviour are used liberally, which is a major "don't" in the study of animal behaviour. She cites her two major scientific influences as being BF Skinner and Konrad Lorenz--again, I am not in disagreement, these two should be required reading for any dog trainer. But what about Pavlov? Pryor's method centers around clicker training, and a clicker is a conditioned reinforcer...a concept that is Pavlovian to the core. To not spend more time discussing Pavlov and his "drooling dogs" as she refers to them briefly, is an oversight in research.

Finally, Pryor discourages the use of food lures (she says that they don't work...but there is no research to support this) and encourages the use of jackpot food rewards (and there is research demonstrating that jackpots are not only ineffective, but can actually inhibit desired behaviours). Overall I enjoyed the book and definitely recommend it as a training guide, but if Ms. Pryor insists upon positioning herself as a scientist, she needs to walk the talk a bit better.

I feel the need to stress, up front, that while this book would appear to be a book about training animals, it has fundamental applications for anyone wishing to change or shape behaviour.

You may have heard of Karen Pryor because of her now famous book, Don't Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training. It was purchased by many dog lovers who then discovered it wasn't necessarily about training dogs!

Reaching The Animal Mind
Karen Pryor's book is based on BF Skinner's research with operant conditioning. The clicker is basically a metal tongue in a plastic housing that makes a click sound when pressed and is used to `mark' quite specifically the desired behaviour. There is hard scientific evidence to back up her work. Pryor, however, avoids the usual boring academic style of writing in favour of a lighthearted approach that makes it fun and humorous to read.

Pryor began training dolphins at Sea Life Park in Hawaii in 1961. Remember that very little was known about dolphins in 1961. Her main qualification for getting the job was that she was married to the Director of the park.

The other trainers were having only limited success with training the wild caught dolphins. This book follows Pryor's journey as she trains creatures as diverse as wolves, dolphins, horses, elephants, fish and dogs. She even trained a hermit crab to ring a bell.

Have an open mind
This book should be read with an open mind and the many step-by-step examples make it easy to understand why clicker training can be used to train ANY animal (including the human animal). There are many short videos on her web site showing how clickers are used with animals and people to achieve amazingly quick and often stunning results.

When used with humans, clicker training is renamed TAG training (Teaching with Acoustical Guidance). Although it's exactly the same, some objected to the term `clicker training' being used with people because it's become associated with animal training.

Improve sports performance
Golfers, gymnasts and other sports people have all improved their performance with TAG training and children are able to TAG each other as peers. Autistic or disabled children have been taught ways to improve their behaviour. A group of fishermen were also trained to improve their performance despite language barriers. There's a description of how a group of young girls were taught to do a Fosbury Flop over a high jump in just 15 minutes of TAG training. You can watch the excellent video that goes with it on the Reaching the Animal Mind web site.

The impact on the brain
Karen proves that you can train any animal to do anything that it's physically and mentally capable of doing. The thing that I've found the most fun is exploring just how far those mental and physical capabilities extend.

One of the most fascinating things about this book is that the `click' sound the clicker makes has a direct impact on the amygdala, the reptilian part of the brain. It registers the click as `new information' and all brains are wired to search out new information.

Absolutely fascinating reading and recommended for those who have an interest in how people and animals learn and how behaviour can be shaped using only positive reinforcement.