Reaching the Animal Mind

Author: Karen Pryor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416546251
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
From the founder of “clicker” training, the widely praised humane approach to shaping animal behavior, comes a fascinating book—part memoir, part insight into how animals and people think and behave. A celebrated pioneer in the field of no-punishment animal training, Karen Pryor is responsible for developing clicker training—an all-positive, safe, effective way to modify and shape animal behavior—and she has changed the lives of millions of animals. Practical, engrossing, and full of fascinating stories about Pryor’s interactions with animals of all sorts, Reaching the Animal Mind presents the sum total of her life’s work. She explains the science behind clicker training, how and why it works, and offers step-by-step instructions on how you can clicker-train any animal in your life. For bonus video clips, slide shows, articles, downloadable exercises, and links expanding on the contents of the book, go to ReachingtheAnimalMind.com.

Plenty in Life Is Free

Author: Kathy Sdao
Publisher: Dogwise Publishing
ISBN: 1617810851
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
In this new book, renowned dog trainer Kathy Sdao reveals how her journey through life and her decades of experience training marine mammals and dogs led her to reject a number of sacred cows including the leadership model of dog training.

Beyond the Brain

Author: Louise Barrett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165564
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world.

On Behavior

Author: Karen Pryor
Publisher: Sunshine Books (MA)
ISBN: 9780962401718
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description

Animal Training

Author: John G. Shedd Aquarium
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Animal training
Languages : en
Pages : 604

Book Description

The Evolution of Mind

Author: Denise D. Cummins
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195110531
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
In The Evolution of Mind, outstanding figures on the cutting edge of evolutionary psychology follow clues provided by current neuroscientific evidence to illuminate many puzzling questions of human cognitive evolution. With contributions from psychologists, ethologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, the book offers a broad range of approaches to explore the mysteries of the mind's evolution - from investigating the biological functions of human cognition to drawing comparisons between human and animal cognitive abilities.

Dog Sense

Author: John Bradshaw
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465031633
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Dogs have been mankind's faithful companions for tens of thousands of years, yet today they are regularly treated as either pack-following wolves or furry humans. The truth is, dogs are neither -- and our misunderstanding has put them in serious crisis. What dogs really need is a spokesperson, someone who will assert their specific needs. Renowned anthrozoologist Dr. John Bradshaw has made a career of studying human-animal interactions, and in Dog Sense he uses the latest scientific research to show how humans can live in harmony with -- not just dominion over -- their four-legged friends. From explaining why positive reinforcement is a more effective (and less damaging) way to control dogs' behavior than punishment to demonstrating the importance of weighing a dog's unique personality against stereotypes about its breed, Bradshaw offers extraordinary insight into the question of how we really ought to treat our dogs.

Can Animals Be Persons?

Author: Mark Rowlands
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190846046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Can animals be persons? To this question, scientific and philosophical consensus has taken the form of a resounding, 'No!' In this book, Mark Rowlands disagrees. Not only can animals be persons, many of them probably are. Taking, as his starting point, John Locke's classic definition of a person, as "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself the same thinking thing, in different times and places," Rowlands argues that many animals can satisfy all of these conditions. A person is an individual in which four features coalesce: consciousness, rationality, self-awareness and other-awareness, and many animals are such individuals. Consciousness--something that is like to have an experience--is widely distributed through the animal kingdom. Many animals are capable of both causal and logical reasoning. Many animals are also self-aware, since a form of self-awareness is essentially built into the possession of conscious experience. And some animals are capable of a kind of awareness of the minds of others, quite independently of whether they possess a theory of mind. This is not just a book about animals, however. As well as being fascinating in their own right, animals, as Claude Levi-Strauss once put it, are "good to think." In this seamless interweaving of the empirical study of animal minds with philosophy and its history, this book makes a powerful case for the idea that reflection on animals allows us to better understand each of these four pillars of personhood, and so illuminates what means for any individual--animal or human--to be conscious, rational, self- and other-aware.

Decoding Your Dog

Author: Steve Dale
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547738919
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
The top dog behaviorists in the country - the top researchers, scientists, and veterinarians - have teamed up with a renowned media personality to create the most cutting-edge, scientifically accurate, definitive book on why our dogs do what they do and how we can prevent or solve common canine behavior problems.

Teaching the Dog to Think

Author: Kimberly Davis
Publisher: Kimberly Davis
ISBN: 9780983449201
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
TEACHING THE DOG TO THINK is Kimberly Davis' engaging memoir about her crash introduction to the sport of dog agility-with its jumps, tunnels, balance beams and weave poles. An award-winning poet and blogger, Davis vividly describes her frustrations trying to get her dog to "mind." We then watch as her first steely-eyed agility coach shames her into giving up choke collars and scruff shakes in favor of the "positive" training methods used by agility instructors. Davis' breezy, often humorous account shows how these new techniques allow her to communicate with the "alien" mind of a dog. Also how they transform her unruly yearling collie, Willow, into a loyal, hardworking teammate. Davis ultimately carries the lessons she has mastered in dog training class into other areas of her life, particularly into parenting and teaching creative writing. In the end, this memoir becomes a soul-searching exploration of how to get others to do what we want without bullying or cruelty-by using our heads and forcing ourselves to be a little smarter. A subtly subversive book about dealing responsibly with those less powerful than ourselves, Teaching The Dog To Think speaks not only to dog lovers, but also to anyone who has ever felt helpless, angry, or frustrated as a parent, teacher or pet owner. "You MUST read this book if you have children or pets, and want to change their behavior without coercion "--Richard McManus, Founder and President, The Fluency Factory "An interesting story of how switching to clicker training vastly improved one agility fan's dog and also changed her own approach to family life."--Karen Pryor, author of Don't Shoot the Dog and Reaching the Animal Mind "A wonderful entry point for anyone learning about these important new methods for teaching skills and enhancing creativity."--Catherine S. Mayes, Independent Autism Advocate and Autism Project Advocate, Massachusetts Advocates for Children