Karen Pryor's "Reaching the Animal Mind": Unlocking the Secrets of Clicker Training for All Animals

B: Fantastic book! This is a great book for anyone wanting to learn more about R+ training. It’s a great place to start!

Canada on Oct 04, 2020

CD: I love this book! Lot of wonderful stories about animal training. She also gives good effort at explaining the science behind clicker training. Karen Pryor herself has an extensive experience in animal training, she is not just someone with just theories behind the training but her methods actually works. Thanks to her, animals are trained more humanely

Canada on Jan 22, 2017

Emma F: A lot of interesting anecdotal stories of how clicker training has worked for all different species from humans to wolves to crabs. The main bit for me was the section at the end where Pryor tells you how to perform clicker training on your dog (or other pet). Still a little tricky in our household where there are two other older dogs who are less in need of training but interfere when trying to do clicker training with our naughty puppy. This book taught me to appreciate the potential value of clicker training and I hope to be able to put it to full use in due course.

United Kingdom on Jan 03, 2017

DogLover: This was a very informative book but I found it more theoretical and not that useful for actually learning how to use clicker training. The author uses many examples of how she used clicker training to train dolphins, horses and dogs. She can train a dog with very little work. I was hoping this book would shed more insight on how to do this but it does not. It is still a very informative and easily readable book.

Canada on Nov 24, 2016

Ms. R. A. Cooper: As a dog trainer in my local club specialising in Clicker training, this book was an absolute joy! I read it in one evening, alternately crying and laughing out loud!
If you ever wondered whether it was really worth trying the clicker, read this book and it will convince you! If you already use it, read this book to remind you how well the method works and how much fun you and your animals can have training using it!
Also, confirms the special way the clicker noise itself runs straight to the 'reptile brain' rather than the cognitive part of the brain, meaning that using a clicker rather than just a 'clicker word' really is better!
I loved this book and will be recommending it to my clicker training students rather than Karen's older book, 'Don't shoot the dog!', as it is more aimed at animal training for the most part.

United Kingdom on Jan 03, 2011

Stephanie Philp: I feel the need to stress, up front, that while this book would appear to be a book about training animals, it has fundamental applications for anyone wishing to change or shape behaviour.

You may have heard of Karen Pryor because of her now famous book, Don't Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training. It was purchased by many dog lovers who then discovered it wasn't necessarily about training dogs!

Reaching The Animal Mind
Karen Pryor's book is based on BF Skinner's research with operant conditioning. The clicker is basically a metal tongue in a plastic housing that makes a click sound when pressed and is used to `mark' quite specifically the desired behaviour. There is hard scientific evidence to back up her work. Pryor, however, avoids the usual boring academic style of writing in favour of a lighthearted approach that makes it fun and humorous to read.

Pryor began training dolphins at Sea Life Park in Hawaii in 1961. Remember that very little was known about dolphins in 1961. Her main qualification for getting the job was that she was married to the Director of the park.

The other trainers were having only limited success with training...

United States on Oct 14, 2010

poltroon: When I was around 11 years old, I browsed the stacks in my local library for a book about dolphins. Among the books I took home that day was Karen Pryor's  Lads Before the Wind : Diary of a Dolphin Trainer , her account of her instant transition from the boss' wife to the head trainer: a few weeks before the grand opening of Sea Life Park in Hawaii, the original hired trainers were gone, and there were no new ones to be had. Pryor, the only person in the group with animal training experience (she'd had dogs and ponies) was given a thick binder of instructions, some porpoises, and a whistle, and an impossible deadline. Through persistence and trial and error, they pulled it off.

At first her memoir frustrated the young perfectionist me, because I wanted to read about the atlantic bottlenoses I'd seen, not these strange pacific porpoises... but not only did I read it cover to cover, I checked it out again and again. That she told not only of successes but of failures was deeply informative. It made a profound impact on how I related to animals, even if I didn't exactly use what would later be called "clicker training" myself. When I found a copy in a used bookstore as an...

United States on May 19, 2009