Reaching the Animal Mind by Karen Pryor

Author:Karen Pryor [Pryor, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw, mobi
Tags: Animals, Reference, Nature, Science, General, Pets, Dogs
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-06-09T21:00:00+00:00

Reducing Fear: Traditional Methods

The traditional tools for overcoming fear are three procedures psychologists call habituation, desensitization, and flooding. (I daresay there are more, but these are the ones people talk about most.) Habituation means just letting the organism live with the upsetting stimulus until it gets used to it. Although I was born and partly raised in Manhattan, when I first moved back to New York as an adult, I was unable to sleep because of the sounds coming from the streets below my apartment: fire engines, police sirens, garbage trucks, shrieks of laughter, car horns, and (only once) gunshots. In a month I didn’t even hear the noise; that’s habituation.

Desensitization, the second method, refers to exposing your learner to the stimulus in small and then gradually increasing amounts. This is the standard way of, say, tempting feral cats out of the bushes or teaching a dog to let you clip its nails or getting a pet bird to sit on your hand. Desensitization can take quite a long time, ranging from a few hours to forever; some wild animals would rather starve to death than come out into the open and take food from your hand. Another problem is that an accidental additional scare can send you right back to the beginning. The animal may become more wary of you than it was when you first showed up.

The third technique trainers sometimes use is flooding: exposing the individual to such extreme levels of the scary thing that it just gives up. I have witnessed a horse trainer’s flooding technique called sacking out. You fill a burlap bag with empty tin cans. You tie the horse by means of a stout rope and halter to a heavy post in the ground, so no matter how it struggles, it can’t get away. Then you whop it from head to tail on both sides with the noisy—but totally harmless—sack of empty tin cans. The horse bucks, bolts, falls down, urinates, defecates, and foams at the mouth, until eventually it just stops and stands there. Theoretically at least, absolutely nothing in the way of touch or sound can frighten it from then on.

All of these methods have been used for centuries, with all kinds of animals, including people. All three procedures have the major drawback of requiring learners to experience the scary thing over and over, being frightened by it again and again, until they accept it (desensitization), learn to ignore it (habituation), or retreat into learned helplessness (flooding). And you can, of course, set things up so that while current fears may still exist, your learner is more afraid of you than of anything else. This fear-inducing use of one’s own skill at dominating others is a favorite technique of some sports coaches, drill sergeants, bosses, and many self-styled expert animal trainers.

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