About this item
An intimate, surprising look at man's best friend and what the leading philosophies of dog training teach us about ourselves.Years back, Melissa Holbrook Pierson brought home a border collie named Mercy, without a clue of how to get her to behave. Stunned after hiring a trainer whose immediate rapport with Mercy seemed magical, Pierson began delving into the techniques of positive reinforcement. She made her way to B. F. Skinner, the behavioral psychologist who started it all, the man who could train a pigeon to dance in minutes and whose research on how behavior is acquired has ramifications for military dolphin trainers, athletes, dancers, and, as he originally conceived, society at large.To learn more, Pierson met with a host of fascinating animal behaviorists, going behind the scenes to witness the relationships between trainers and animals at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, and to the in-depth seminars at a Clicker Expo where all the dogs but hers seemed to be learning new tricks.
About the Author
And now, this coming October, she returns to the territory of her first book with The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing: Long-Distance Motorcycling's Endless Road, an exploration of obsessive riding by way of one of the most extreme practitioners of it, world-record-holder John Ryan. All her books have been published by the esteemed independent publisher W. W. Norton.
