Tue 16 Jan 2007
I found this article quite amusing. It’s by a journalist who was preparing a book on exotic animal training, and the applications to her marriage. Clearly I am not qualified to comment on the advisability of her methods, but I enjoyed the read.
If the link breaks, google for “What shamu taught me about marriage.”
For those of you without NYT’s accounts, um, get one (free) because I love sending people links from the NYT’s. But, if you send me an email I’ll email the article to you.
2 Responses to “New York Times article on training.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
January 20th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
It was interesting to me to observe my reactions to this article as I read it. While I found that I agreed with the points the author made (e.g., you can’t change others, only your reactions to them; nagging never works and only makes you feel like a nag), I was very uncomfortable with the idea of “training” people you care about. It was definitely good for a laugh, and certainly there’s a lot of joking around in our culutre about “training” your mate, but I know that if someone were manipulating my behavior in this way, I would feel like they weren’t treating me as an equal. The line “I wanted to throw him a mackerel” is a good example of what made me cringe. Do we really want to think about our loved ones this way? Even if it works?
What I concluded is that it is the way the author presented it that made me uncomfortable, and not the ideas themselves. What she is essentially saying is, animal behavioral psychology is not that different from human behavioral psychology. As an afficionado of zoologists like Desmond Morris, I find this hard to controvert.
What saved my opinion of the author was that she talked over what she was doing with her husband, and he was fine with it. After they’d had a good laugh, they found they’d acquired some new vocabulary for talking about their relationship. To me, being in a relationship isn’t about training the other person so much as learning how to live together in a way that makes both partners happy.
Thanks for this thought-provoking post, Max!
January 21st, 2007 at 1:49 am
I’m torn. On the one hand you made lots of good points. On the other, I really like Mackeral, and wish I were so lucky as to have women throwing me tasty fish. wait. Strike that last part.
It does seem like a risky thing to try on people you don’t know well. I suppose it appeals a great deal to me because it seems like a humorous way to interact: Explicit manipulation. The key word being explicit. If the victim is being unknowingly manipulated it is much more mean-spirited.