Spouses Are Like Dolphins or Elephants
Or like hyenas, cougars, and yes, baboons. Read on.
Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.
I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
It always pleases me enormously–given the fact that I earn my livelihood by doing what I do in the classroom–that everything in the end turns out to be a matter of correct pedagogy.
will try this if the dog whisperer method doesn’t work out.
Comment by Linta Varghese — June 29, 2006 @ 5:56 pm
Does everything in the end turn out to be a matter of pedagogy? Louis Menand or John Updike (interchangeable) pointed out that marriage forms the core of American social experience. A novelist in America is compelled to marry or else be reduced to silence. Gay and lesbian marriage is also a demand for aesthetic normativity. Even Oscar Wilde wrote incessantly about marriage (”An Ideal Husband,” “divorces are made in heaven,” “in marriage, three is company and two is none”). No wonder that even an animal book turns out then to be about marriage. Where are you, Jean Genet?
Comment by Hap — June 30, 2006 @ 2:09 am
What pleased me the most was the author’s recognizing the truth of the trainers’ motto: “It’s never the animal’s fault.” It’s what I’ve been telling my wife all along….
Comment by Abhijit Sahay — June 30, 2006 @ 11:04 am