Gather Adams Task: Calling Animals By Name Compiled By Vicki Hearne Readable In Version

intertwines her knowledge of horse and dog training with philosophical insights into the nature of our relationships with animals, Some of her literary/philosophical references were over my head, and her writing style was a bit convoluted at times, but overall I enjoyed her perspective on animal consciousness, language, and morality.
Hearne is an intelligent and thoughtful writer, a poet and academic who argues that anthropomorphism isn't necessarily a bad thing, remaining respectful and appreciative of animals without becoming saccharine.
I really struggled with rating this book settling on a,rounded up because my reaction to this book vacillated so wildly, The writing veers from beautifully evocative to philosophical rambling that borders on incoherence, I can appreciate the linguistic nuance Hearne tries to pin down about animal comprehension and motivation, but a lot of her methodologies made me recoil.
For every eureka! flash of insight I found, there was something like the section in which she concludes that dog fighting might not be as cruel as it seems because some dogs love to fight.
Sorry, no go.

So: as many bad parts as there are good, Or as many good parts as there are bad, I read this book years ago and it still stays with me, Vicki Hearne was a very engaging author, She illustrates her points well with stories, This is a classic. Her essay "What's Wrong with Animal Rights" is worth the price of the book, Unraveling and exploring the complex relationships we have with animals, Hearne starts with language, . . and all the assumptions behind the language we use when we talk about animals,
Although I take issue with her METHODS, . . this book changed my life as a trainer and as a thinker, What does it mean to trust Must we mean what we say What does it means to commit, . . It's dense,but highly readable and full of a unusual and compassionate light, I enjoyed Hearne's anecdotes on training, although I think if you are a horse or a dog "person" you'll enjoy it more.
I don't agree with all she says, especially while reading this next to Cary Wolfe's Animal Rites but she is a thoughtful writer, and her accounts of crazy horses and crazy dogs hit home for me.
This is one of my favorite books of all time, Hearne's observations on the importance of coherence to the sanity of animals and humans! rang immediately true to me, as did the complexity of navigating between the academic, intellectual world and the pragmatic world of those who work, daytoday, with companion animals.
Some feel the book is "too philosophical," but it's a philosophy book, and Hearne was a leading Wittgenstein scholar, as well as being one of the country's most accomplished trainers of searchandrescue dogs.
I think she captures perfectly the dissonance between those worlds, the fundamental incoherence between them, which is also embodied in the reviews.
Just as she couldn't talk to academics about animals, she couldn't talk to animal trainers about academic philosphy, and the complaints about "too much philosophy" seem to underline the truth of what she writes.
To read Hearne fully, one needs to understand that the academic/practical split is unnecessary, and that it only serves to shore up the prejudices of those trapped in one camp or the other.
Vicki Hearne tells stories about "domesticated" animals, and why they are loyal to us, Horses, dogs and other creatures are fulfilling the contract they know they have with humans, They hold up their part of that agreement nobly and generously even in spite of the failings of humans whose lives they share.
I've loved this book for years because it made me aware of the great hearts of the horses, dogs, cats, birds and cattle I've known.
Animals have made me a better person, Hearne was a marvelous poet, an amateur philosopher, and on the evidence of this book a superb animal trainer, It belongs on that short shelf of indispensable books about the nature of animals and the necessity for human straight talk and right thinking when working with them.
Chapteris one if the most interesting and deep chapters on the philosophy of language I have ever read, Fantastic. Packed full like an overflowing suitcase of implications about how both humans and dogs become the best versions of themselves, In it Vicki Hearne asserts that animals that interact with humans are more intelligent than we assume, In fact, they are capable of developing an understanding of “the good,” a moral code that influences their motives and actions.
Hearnes thorough studies led her to adopt a new system of animal training that contradicts modern animal behavioral research, butas her examples showis astonishingly effective.
Hearnes theories will make every trainer, animal psychologist, and animallover stop, think, and question, I despised the writing in this book, I was tempted to stop many times when the inane, incomprehensible, philosophical babbling got too much but then there would be an actual animal training story that would catch my interest and I would labor on.
Hearne had some interesting things to say but would always write it in the most academic and confusing way possible, She also constantly throws in random literary references in a way that made me feel like she was “showing off” rather than actually trying to make her message clearer or more compelling.


I wanted to show an example of what I mean so I flipped the book open to a random page and found a sample paragraph:

In the case of dictatorships, Auden might want to remind us that there is also this consideration: “Of a community it may be said that its love is more or less good.
” Perfect love doesnt exist perhaps our sense of uneasiness in the presence of what we call fanaticism may be expressed, not only, as Wallace Stevens had it, by talking about the “logical lunatic,” the “lunatic of one idea / In a world of ideas,” but also by saying that fanatics dont seem to have noticed that the world really is fallen, and that acknowledgment of this is as essential to our lives as that acknowledgment of human separation is to the prevention of tragedies in human love.
Political tragedy, perhaps, comes about through failing to acknowledge imperfections in our apprehension of the sacred, what Cavell calls “the separation from God.
” pg

Hearnes philosophy of training is somewhat controversial but its hard to argue with the results she describes, She believes in respect rather than kindness and has a revulsion for owners who say things like “what a good doggy”.
She talks a lot about “corrections” which sound harsh to me, such as pinching a dogs ears or pushing its head into a hole filled with water.
However she does clearly love working with animals and she wants them to reach their potential, It made me think about whether the same logic applies to people, It all left me kind of confused and vaguely uncomfortable,

Overall its a good thing I got this for free or I would want my money back,

I believe that the disciplines of animal training come to us in the form they do because deep in human beings is the impulse to perform Adam's task, to name animals and people as well, and to name them in such a way that the grammar is flexible enough to do two things.
One is to make names that give the soul room for expansion, My talk of the change from utterances such as “Belle, Sit!” to “Belle, Go find!” is an example of names projecting the creature named into more glorious contexts.
. . But I think our impulse is also conservative, an impulse to return to Adam's divine condition, I can't imagine how we would do that, or what it would be like, but linguistic anthropology has found out some things about illiterate peoples that suggest at least names that really call, language that is genuinely invocative and uncontaminated by writing and thus by the concept of names as labels rather than genuine invocations.

According to her Wikipedia page, Vicki Hearne “was an American author, philosopher, poet, animal trainer, and scholar of literary criticism and linguistics”, and I note all of that to stress that I acknowledge that Hearne also a Yale professor of Creative Writing was a noted expert on many topics arcane to me and that any divide of comprehension between what she wrote and what I understood can surely be attributed to my own failings.
I found several philosophical passages to be completely unintelligible to me, but as the majority of sitelinkAdam's Task concerns Hearne's own philosophy of animal training controversial in her day, but you couldn't argue with her results, and as most of the book is a collection of anecdotes about animal training and the humandomesticated animal bond, I was interested in and followed along with the majority of what she wrote.
Even so, as this was originally released in, some parts feel grossly outdated I've noted strange bits about both pit bulls and autism below, and that makes this hard to rate my inner needle is wavering between two and four and refuses to settle, so I'll take the coward's way out and award three which reflects neither my admiration for Hearne's scholarship or my queasiness about the parts that don't seem to have aged well.

If one goes about all day expounding the principles of animal training, one gets no training done.
Besides, there aren't any principles of animal training, only some aphorisms, dog stories and what not, just as there don't seem to be, if one looks closely, any principles of philosophy, just some insightful epigrams and philosopher stories.

In part, Hearne seems to have written this book in reaction to the animal rights activists what she calls “humaniacs” and the Behavioral Psychiatrists who, in thes, had decided that nonhuman animals have no intelligence or emotions as we would define them to say so is rank anthropomorphism, and to the extent that one can train a dog or horse, the Behaviorists would call only positive reinforcement techniques effective and appropriate with the humaniacs believing that all animals should be left in their natural states companion dogs might be bribed and charmed to behave somewhat civilly, but left to run off leashes, never commanded, and never put to work.
Opposed to this pointofview, as a miracleworking dog and horse trainer, Hearne grew to believe that as the modern members of these two species were specifically bred and developed to work in concert with humans, it is a kindness to work them hard to inspire dogs and horses to achieve the difficult tasks of scenttracking or showjumping if it be in their abilities in order to remind them of their intelligence, heroism, morality, and worth.
To Hearne, it insults a dog's intelligence to coo and pet at it when a sharp tug up on a collar and leash which is, to be fair, what Cesar Millan does on his shows or the twisting of a puppy's ear which is, to be fair, how a puppy's mother teaches her litter can speak to a dog in a language it understands and thus begin a conversation between species:

Some dogs make continuous declarations of love or seem to and this can enable some people to survive psychic wildernesses of one sort and another, but it is only training, work, that creates a shared grammar of objects of contemplation outside of the dog and the master, and there's where the best conversations start and with them the bonds of that deeper love that consists in thinking.

In her stories, Hearne was able to rehabilitate bad dogs and crazy horses and she achieved it by creating a shared language that allowed her to join the animal in the places that were sacred to them to have a conversation between souls.
I found it fascinating that Hearne dismisses the “language” of chimps who use sign language because, invariably, these handraised chimps became dangerous at sexual maturity Hearne didn't believe you had ever had a true conversation with a sane being if it can become murderous as you talk together.
Of course, chimpanzee babies might be tamed, but the species is not domesticated, In training horses to jump fences, Hearne was accused of pushing animals beyond their physical limits or natural instincts, but always, Hearne believed that she was simply helping the horses to express their innermost selves:

Horses do have some sensitivity to the knowledge of death, and it makes them nervous, just as it makes us nervous.
That knowledge is what they are relieved of, just as their riders are, in the tremendous concentration of horsemanship at the highest levels.
. . Nothing short of the tremendous artistic task of training them in such a fashion as they can be released from time could ever justify our interfering with their greater serenity, our imposing our stories and our deathly arithmetics on their coherent landscapes.
What they mean by their artistry, then, is just this, which one could call the release from time, but which could also be understood as what happens when a horse becomes time's lover or time's partner, moving with time instead of as time's slave.

I did enjoy the parts on dogs and horses, chimps and cats the last of which can't be “trained” but which live out their stories as human companions to the heights of noble catness, but then Hearne included a chapter on pit bulls which were just beginning to develop a bad reputation at the time because she had raised a pit bull of her own.
Hearne explained, persuasively, the traits of the breed that make them wonderful companions and working dogs, but she also lamented the fact that the bad press seemed to be attracting the wrong kind of owner for the dog stressing that without proper and intensive training, pit bulls are too much dog for most people.
This all made sense to me even if I couldn't get behind her idea that, as a trainer, she ought to be allowed to have her pit bull at Yale with her which she insisted upon, despite the fear and criticism of others, but then she started writing about dog fights and how fighting just might be the way to allow some dogs to express what is sacred within them:

It is possible for me to contemplate the possibility that allowing the right Pit Bulls, in the hands of the right people, to fight can be called kind because it answers to some energy essential to the creature, and I think of energy, when I think of certain horses, as the need for heroism.

She even contemplated allowing her own dog, Belle, to be “rolled” for fighting despite writing, “The fights are, unless one dog quits, fights to the death”, and seemed to only decide against it because she was considering breeding Belle, and once they have fought, pit bulls become more interested in fighting than mating with another dog, even if both are muzzled.
I don't think you need to be a humaniac to decry dogfighting this extreme view of meeting the sacred in an animal by matching their work to their abilities seems to undermine the whole argument for me.


Hearne also writes about children with autism in a couple of places she knew people doing work with autistic or troubled children and often offered to work a dog or horse with them, to good result, and in the last chapter, she tells a story about an acquaintance, Ivar Lovaas, who, using “a wholly behaviorist vocabulary”, taught a pair of autistic twin boys to open their arms to one another and say, “Give me a hug.
” In the film Hearne watched of this, the gesture and words

seemed totally mechanical and devoid of real meaning, but apparently one day, one of the boys opened his arms and said, “Give me a hug” to his brother, and when the second brother ignored him, the first burst into tears the first real emotional display of his life.
Hearne compares this moment to Caliban, in The Tempest, cursing Miranda for giving him language, and Hearne marks this moment in the boy's life as when he first knew beauty and its obverse, grief.
Why, she wonders, would we put autistic children through this when “autistic children themselves are apparently quite happy”

The alternative to the kind of training Lovaas does is a life in a hospital, continuously drugged and restrained a life that does not seem to make autistic people unhappy.
They are quite content. Why interfere with their contentment Wittgenstein, who once said, “We like the world because we do,” might here say we do this because we do it.
Interfere we must.

Ending on this note made me, again, reappraise everything Hearne had written: In response to animal rights activists, Hearne insists on using her training methods to establish a language with dogs and horses, in order to help these animals to express themselves to the fullest.
But no efforts should be made to establish a language with children on the spectrum in order to help them to express themselves I don't know if it's the passage of time that makes this entire chapter distasteful to me or if I would have agreed with her point back in thes.
But I don't think I would have,

Hearne quotes freely from philosophical thought, English literature, and conversations with her fellow trainers.
Alongside this high material, she can sneak in some snarky attacks, as when writing about the kind of psychologists who think they can learn about animal behaviour in the lab, “I was stupidly supposing the point of these efforts was to understand animals, and it wasn't at all.
The point was simply to Do Science, ” Or back to the pit bulls, “Debates about dog fighting take place over the lusty pastime of consuming the flesh of animals who have suffered a great deal more than any fighting dog ever does.
” Adam's Task was full of highlights and lowlights for me, but ultimately, I was very interested in Hearne's methods for developing a nonverbal language and conversations with dogs and horses, so I'm happy to have read it.
Ultimately, I'd be interested in a more modern work along the same line,

I am ending my book by appealing to the sense I have developed, as a result of reading and thinking like a dog and horse trainer for several decades now, that animals matter to us, and that the way they matter to us is probably all we can know of how and why we matter.

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