Amy Sutherland > Quotes

“[My husband] can beat most anyone in Trivial Pursuit, but only because the game does not include questions like "Where is your wallet?”
― Amy Sutherland, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers

“If this trainer had used traditional techniques, the leash-popping and pushing your dog this way and that, I think the story would have ended there. For me, there is little magic nor imagination in that old-school approach. But it was my good luck that the trainer used progressive, positive techniques, techniques based on an altogether different philosophy. Rather than learning to boss our pups around and make them into obedient dogs, we learned to communicate and cooperate with them. She didn’t teach us just how to get our dogs to sit, but rather how to think about our canine companions.”
― Amy Sutherland, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers

“As one shelter leader put it to me, it’s not a question of if a shelter dog will deteriorate. It’s a question of when. There’s some debate as to whether the dogs are deteriorating or, rather, displaying what is normal behavior under trying circumstances. That “normal” won't help dogs get adopted. That’s why the current thinking on remedying kennel stress is to find a dog a home pronto. In the meantime, shelters such as the ARL do what they can to relieve a dog’s duress with walks, play groups, snuggling, toy puzzles, all of which is referred to as “enrichment.” Other shelters have constructed larger, better buildings with training arenas and soundproof kennels. Rich Avanzino, of course, has the most radical answer to kennel stress: get rid of the shelters.”
― Amy Sutherland, Rescuing Penny Jane: One Shelter Volunteer, Countless Dogs, and the Quest to Find Them All Homes

“Train every animal as if it’s a killer whale” meant to work with every animal as if you could neither forcibly move it nor dominate it. “It’s never the animal’s fault” is pretty much what it says: If an animal flounders in training, it’s the trainer’s fault.”
― Amy Sutherland, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers

“Any interaction is training. Translation: Every time you have any kind of contact with an animal—when you leave food on the floor, talk to it, pass its enclosure—you are teaching it something whether you mean to or not.”
― Amy Sutherland, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers

“There are so many big-picture ways to help dogs, to find them more homes—new ways of thinking, fresh ideas to fill a crisp three-ring binder, long lists of training techniques—but I’m just a Shelter volunteer. All I can do is help these dogs one by one in the relatively short time I have, with a stroll, a game of fetch, some people-watching, or just a chance to be themselves”
― Amy Sutherland, Rescuing Penny Jane: One Shelter Volunteer, Countless Dogs, and the Quest to Find Them All Homes

“But he can also get on my nerves. He hovers around me in the kitchen when I’m trying to concentrate on the simmering pans, asking me if I read this or that piece in The New Yorker. He finishes off boxes of cookies, especially the dense caramel bars his mother sends from Minnesota, then says “I thought you were done with them.”
― Amy Sutherland, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers