Excerpt: ‘What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love ...’

They say heaven knows ... so why not see what stars have in store for you today?

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As I observed the students, I essentially became a student too. I learned not to look the primates in the eye, to stride with confident ease while on a cougar walk, and never to stand close to any enclosure, especially not the big carnivores’. I learned that when Zulu the mandrill bobbed his head at me, he was saying “Back off.” That when Rosie the baboon smacked her lips together, she was saying “Hello, friend.” That when Julietta the emu made a thumping noise in her chest, she was worried.

I learned the language of animal trainers, what they meant when they talked about A-to-Bs (teaching an animal to move from one spot to another) or targeting (having an animal press its snout to something). If somebody told me that they had just been grooming with the squirrel monkey, I knew that they had sat close to the cage, held up their arms, and let the monkey run his black fingers over their skin. I learned what a positive count is (making sure the animal is there in its enclosure) and that B.E. stood for “behavioral enrichment,” basically anything that made the animal’s life more stimulating, whether it be a toy or a walk on a leash. Training, it turns out, is one of the things that make an animal’s life interesting. So you could even teach an animal an A-to-B for B.E.

I soaked up their sayings, such as “Go back to kindergarten,” shorthand for when an animal has trouble learning a behavior and the trainer needs to back up a few steps in the training. “Train every animal as if it’s a killer whale” meant to work with every animal as if you could neither forcibly move it nor dominate it. “It’s never the animal’s fault” is pretty much what it says: If an animal flounders in training, it’s the trainer’s fault. One of my personal favorites was “Everything with a mouth bites.” I wrote down that line in all caps, for my research but for myself too. Why? I wasn’t sure exactly. It had a philosophical ring. It was also silly, but made such good, plain sense, a funny reminder of what a great leveler Mother Nature can be. A cute, fuzzy animal will bite you just as easily as a mean-looking one. By the same token, the animal doesn’t care whether you’re as angelic as Mother Teresa or as loathsome as Caligula. Shiny auras, the best intentions, and sainthood don’t mean much, if anything, in the animal kingdom.

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So much of what I was learning at the school had meaning beyond the front gate. This place, where the great divide between animals and humans closes, captured my imagination in a way nothing else had. Every visit drove home how complicated, weird, and fantastic the natural world is. I felt my mind crack wide open trying to take it all in.

I trailed the students to class and then out to the teaching zoo grounds where they practiced on a badger or a lion or the mysterious binturong, a rain forest animal that resembles a raccoon on steroids. I watched as one student trained an olive baboon to let her rub lotion on her hands, as another taught a capuchin monkey to unravel its long leash when it became tangled during walks, and yet another instruct the Bengal tiger to get in her kiddie pool on command. I tagged along on field trips, during which I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip or ibis to fly to them. At a private compound in Southern California, I took notes in the fading light of day as six elephants, on command, lined up in a row, urinated, turned to their left in unison, hooked trunks to tails, and, single file, swaggered into the barn for the night. In Cincinnati, I saw a leashed cheetah sit calmly on a desk next to a trainer as she lectured to a bewitched audience. At a conference in Baltimore, I listened as trainers described how they had taught spotted eagle rays to swim to a feeder.

I can’t say the instant it happened, but eventually it dawned on me that if trainers could work such wonders with spotted eagle rays and baboons and dolphins, might not their methods apply to another species — humans? It was not much of a leap for me. By just watching, thinking, and reading about animal behavior, I had discovered a good deal about the behavior of my own species. In a kind of reverse anthropomorphism,

I couldn’t help seeing parallels, especially with the 10 primates, but with all the animals, even the turkey vulture, which, like us, sunbathes. True, people are more complicated than animals, but maybe not as much as we assume. As the relatively nascent field of animal behavior continues to grow, more and more research shows that animals are anything but mindless organisms driven solely by instinct. Traits that were considered unique to humans, such as tool use and collaboration, have been found among other primates and now birds and fish. Turns out groupers and moray eels hunt together, and crows are quite handy with a bit of wire.

Complicated or not, we Homo sapiens, the highest of the primates, the tippy-top of the food chain, a frighteningly successful species, are, in the end, members of the animal kingdom, like it or not. Animal trainers showed me that there are universal rules of behavior that cut across all species. Why should we be any different?

I began to take home what I learned at the teaching zoo. If my husband did something that annoyed me, I thought, “How would an exotic animal trainer respond?” If I got into a squabble with a relative, I did the same. If the clerk at the post office gave me a hard time, likewise. That may sound ridiculous. I admit it. In fact, at the start I thought of it as a kind of goofy experiment, but the early results were so convincing that I kept at it.

Did I teach my husband and friends to sit and stay? No, of course not. What would be the point of that? Okay, it would be a funny party trick, especially if I trained them to crow and scratch like roosters on command. My purpose, however, was not to bend people to my will, but to better navigate the human interactions and relationships that fill my days. Funny thing is, I ultimately learned some pretty obvious lessons, such as to have more patience with my husband, with everyone for that matter, lessons I could have gotten out of a self-help book or in half a session with a therapist. But had I heard these words of wisdom from a counselor or read them in some over-earnest manual stamped with smiley faces, I would have thought, “Duh,” and gone off and lost my patience with someone. Even if I had cracked a dolphin-training manual, I still wouldn’t have been inspired to change. But learning, actually seeing, these obvious lessons via sea lions, fennec foxes, Harris’s hawks, and squirrel monkeys captured my imagination and made self-improvement, for once, engrossing, even fun. Instead of thinking, “Don’t call him a space shot,” I’d ask myself, “What would a dolphin trainer do?”

That is what I’m doing right now as my agitated husband looks for his keys.

* * *

The answer is “nothing.” Dolphin trainers, in fact all progressive trainers, reward the behavior they want and ignore the behavior they don’t. So I’m ignoring behavior I don’t want — Scott’s rising temper. I don’t even call out places to look. Rather, I, lips sealed, keep at the task at hand, rinsing a plate. At the sink, I hear my husband bang a closet door shut, rustle through papers on a chest in the front hall, and thump upstairs. I pop the plate into the dishwasher and rinse another. Then, sure enough, all goes quiet.

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Excerpt: ‘What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love ...’