Having quite a few hoplophobes in my family and being on the board with a few more I often find it odd how much views on guns have changed over not so long a time. I'm reading a book, copywrite 1984 called Don't Shoot the Dog. It is about behavior training both in animals and people. We're considering getting a dog so I'm reading about dog training. This book, by Karen Pryor, is the seminal work that introduced people to something now called clicker training (of which there are many subsequent books.) (If you go to the web site, check out the video of the agility cat. Amazing!)
Anyway, back to the subject of this post. Now the name of the book wasn't actually the suprising thing. What suprised me was something I read in the book just yesterday in the discussion Methods vs. Principles in shaping behaviors:
"Most trainers, most books about training, and most teachers of training are concerned almost entirely with method. "Place your hands on the golf club as in the drawing"; "Line up your rifle sights before you aim at the target"; "Never lean into the mountain"; "Beat the eggs with a wire whisk in a clockwise direction"...
Did you notice that? Aiming a rifle in the same sentance with golf and cooking as if it were no big deal. People shoot rifles. No big deal. I would be quite suprised to see such a sentance in a recently written training book, unless it was a book more likely to be read by people who shoot (such as a book on training hunting dogs) but this book is hardly that. The previous book by the author was "Nursing Your Baby" and this book has an aprobation from the chairman of the La Leche League.
