Animals in Translation Read Online Free

punishment) decreased behavior. If you wanted to teach a really complex behavior, all you had to do was break it down into its component parts and teach each little, tiny step separately, giving rewards along the way. That was called task analysis, and it was a huge help not only for animal training (though animal trainers had always done this to some extent), but also for anybody trying to teach children or adults with disabilities. I’ve seen behavioral books for parents that take all the different things a child or adult has to do during the day, like get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and so on, and break each activity down into its component parts. A supposedly simple thing like getting your clothes on in the morning might involve twenty or thirty different steps or more, and a task analysis lists each one, and you teach each one separately.
    Doing a task analysis isn’t as easy as it sounds, because nonhandicapped people aren’t really aware of the very small, separate movements that go into an action like tying your shoe or buttoning your shirt. Typical kids pick these things up pretty easily, so parents don’t have to be especially skilled to teach them how to put their clothes on or tie their shoes. If you’ve ever tried to teach shirt buttoning to a person who has absolutely no clue how to do it, you soon realize that you don’t really know how to do it, either—not in the sense of knowing the sequence of tiny, separate motions that go into successfully buttoning a button. You just do it.
    The behaviorists’ belief that any animal or person could learn just about anything if the rewards were right led Ivar Lovaas to his work with autistic children. In his most famous study he took a group of very young autistic kids and gave one half of the children intensive behavior therapy while the other half got much less intensive treatment. Behavior therapy just meant classical operant conditioning, having the kids go over and over the behaviors Dr. Lovaas wanted them to learn and giving them rewards whenever they got something right. He published results showing that half of the kids who got the intensive therapy became “indistinguishable” from normal kids. 4
    There’ve been years of controversy over whether Dr. Lovaas did or didn’t cure anybody, but to me, the fact that he brought those kids so far there could be an argument about it is what matters. Behaviorism gave parents and teachers a reason to think that autisticpeople were capable of a lot more than anybody thought, and that was a good thing.
    The other major contribution behaviorists made is that they were, and still are today, fantastically close observers of animal and human behavior. They could spot tiny changes in an animal’s behavior quickly, and connect the changes to something in the environment. That’s one of my own most important talents with animals.
    So for all of its problems, behaviorism had a lot to offer, and still does. Besides, the animal ethologists had their blind spots, too. For instance, both the ethologists and the behaviorists were in total agreement that practically the worst thing anyone could possibly do was to anthropomorphize an animal. Ethologists and behaviorists probably had different reasons for being against anthropomorphism—Dr. Skinner thought it was just as bad to anthropomorphize a person as an animal—but whatever the reasons, they agreed. Anthropomorphizing an animal was wrong.
    To a large degree they were right to stress this, because humans just naturally treat their pets as if they’re four-legged people a lot of the time. Professional trainers are constantly telling people not to assume their pets think and feel the same way they do, but people keep on doing it anyway. The dog trainer John Ross even has a story in his book Dog Talk about the first time he realized he was being anthropomorphic, and he’s a professional. He had an Irish setter named