What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers
Amy Sutherland
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0812978080
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
While observing trainers of exotic animals, journalist Amy Sutherland had an epiphany: What if she used their techniques with the human animals in her own life–specifically her dear husband, Scott? As Sutherland put training principles into action, she noticed that not only did her twelve-year-old marriage improve, but she herself became more optimistic and less judgmental. What started as a goofy experiment had such good results that Sutherland began using the training techniques with all the people in her life, including her mother, her friends, her students, even the clerk at the post office. Full of fun facts, fascinating insights, hilarious anecdotes, and practical tips, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage reveals the biggest lesson Sutherland learned: The only animal you can truly change is yourself.
(my parrot bit me because it’s jealous of my boyfriend) to explain the way animals behave. As expert bird trainer Steve Martin has written, in that case, the parrot would bite the boyfriend. Parrots don’t displace, rationalize, or sublimate. We touchy-feely Homo sapiens assume all creatures great and small would like a pat on the head, a hug, even a big kiss. Just because we’d love to throw our arms around an orangutan, a sea lion, or a baby panda doesn’t mean the orangutan, sea lion, or baby
these little quirks, we respond, “I do?” My mother uses the word “cute” (as in “Isn’t that ka-yute?”) constantly. When you tease her, she’ll respond, “Have I been saying that a lot?” I often forget to zip my computer backpack closed, though I’ve had strangers, even a Boston police officer, point this out to me. I laugh really loud, which I was unaware of until my husband, embarrassed in a reserved Minnesotan kind of way, took to patting me on the leg each time I guffawed. Despite the patting, I
interim I had learned exactly nothing about how to pedal more safely, and now I was steering with one usable arm. My father’s punishment had taught me an unintended lesson, too, as punishment often does: that he could be a real jerk sometimes. PUNISHMENT CAN WORK, BUT… I have seen two excellent, well-timed, to-the-point uses of punishment with animals, one while Cathryn Hilker, a gregarious big cat trainer and I were in a large enclosure with two young cheetahs at the Cincinnati Zoo. We were
me rich, nor a genius, nor immune to bad luck. Fate still bats me with its huge paws, occasionally sinking its fangs into me. Life, like a wild animal, even a well-trained wild animal, remains fundamentally unpredictable. I have the scars to prove it, especially a fresh one, still tender to the touch. When Dixie was five, we learned that one of her kidneys had shriveled. The other was failing. For one year we popped a small white antibiotic into her mouth twice a day. We fed her special food
communicate all that plus discuss Proust, debate stem cell research, and parse our feelings ad infinitum. But keep in mind that if it was to a species’ evolutionary advantage to discuss the madeleine reverie in Remembrance of Things Past, it would have evolved to do so. Mother Nature would have supplied the needed DNA. As it is, we are the only species to need that skill—so far. And sometimes we are so busy debating nineteenth-century French literature that we don’t yell “Leopard!” when we