Reading: Reaching the Animal Mind

I just finished reading Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals. I've mentioned before that I just started clicker training my own dogs, and I thought this book would be a good read since Karen Pryor is the mother of clicker training. I wasn't disappointed.

This book isn't about how to clicker train your pet. It doesn't give step by step instructions on how to get your dog to learn the coolest new trick.*  Instead, it goes over why clicker training (and positive reinforcement in general) works so well. Pryor talks a lot about her own personal experiences with positive reinforcement training - how she's trained dolphins, and horses in addition to dogs. She even shares a story about how someone trained their cat!

The cons of the book? The science! I am no scientist, and while I really loved the fact that this training is backed up by scientific evidence, including the scientific name for different types of dolphins and learning about the brain wasn't as interesting to me as the anecdotal stories of how people used positive reinforcement. That said, it wasn't a big detraction from the book.

Overall, it gives great insight into how and why positive reinforcement techniques work. And while it's not a how-to training guide, it does give a lot of information on clicker training techniques and how people can "poison" the process. It also provides a lot of comparisons between "traditional" training methods and clicker training, showing how shaping behavior can be a better long-term solution than punishment.  This was a great first read for clicker training information and I definitely plan on reading more.

*well, it sort of does. Pryor devotes a few pages of the book to teach your dog targeting. While this is very interesting information (and I plan on trying it out on my dogs), it's not enough to constitute a training manual.