Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name

by Vicki Hearne

Adam's Calling Animals by Vicki Adam's Calling Animals by Akadine FIRST First Edition, Fourth Printing. Not price-clipped. Published by The Akadine Press, 2000. Octavo. Paperback. Book is like new. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.Seller 307188 Science & Nature We Buy Books! Collections - Libraries - Estates - Individual Titles. Message us if you have books to sell!

Genres: Animals, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science, Dogs, Nature, History

274 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Victoria Elizabeth "Vicki" Hearne was an American author, philosopher, poet, animal trainer, and scholar of literary criticism and linguistics.

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 Adam'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 human-domesticated animal bond, I was interested in and followed along with the majority of what she wrote. Even so, as this was originally released in 1986, 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 stars 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 the 80s, 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 point-of-view, as a miracle-working 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 scent-tracking or show-jumping (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 hand-raised 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 the 80s. (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.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really struggled with rating this book -- settling on a 2.5* 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.

[Jamey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only writer on animals I know of who combines (a) decades of experience training horses and dogs, with (b) a robust acquaintance with Wittgenstein. And she can write, too.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

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:
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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 doesn’t 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 don’t 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 66)
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Hearne’s philosophy of training is somewhat controversial but it’s 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 it’s a good thing I got this for free or I would want my money back.

[Aili · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. It is about loving animals, but NOT in a cute-widdle-wooda-wooda way. More in the sense of recognizing them as living beings. File under animal (and human) cognition, psychology, and philosophy; and maaaaybe animal training after that (but while it gives some excellent advice, this is in no way a how-to manual).

In fact the only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars is that I have absolutely zero grounding in philosophy, and some of the academic discussion (Stanley Cavell? doesn't ring a bell) was really heavy going and I skimmed more than processed the ideas. But that's my failure as a reader, not Hearne's failure -- she's writing heavy stuff, and expects the reader to keep up.

Read if you love, well, thinking. And own, or might ever own, a doggie or a kitty.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Amantha · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book - well, actually just the author - was recommended to me about 10 years ago in grad school. The topic was very vaguely related to my thesis but enough so for me to drop everything and read it on the spot, so I saved it to read when I had the time.

Unfortunately, I found the author's ideas to be woefully out of date and old-fashioned. She advocates "correcting" dogs with a commanding, authoritative yank on the leash instead of positive praise. She relates a (make-believe?) story of a grandson who yells at his grandmother for feeding his dog table scraps, and she presents it as thought the grandson is quite in his right to do so. As if it's the grandmother's fault for "demeaning" the dog by getting it to beg, and that the grandson is right to be outraged by this behavior. As if it isn't the grandson's fault for not communicating his training goals with his dog ahead of time.

I did not actually finish this book. I read the first two chapters, part of chapter three, skipped to the last chapter to see what she had to say about autism (not much useful, and again horribly outdated), then skimmed around a bit which led me to the anecdote about the grandson. I have no doubt this book was revolutionary when it first came out, but I can't help being appalled. I didn't mind the philosophical aspects like other 1-star raters did, but the fact remains that every aspect Hearne covers (psychology, philosophy, training, animal behavior) has advanced rapidly in the last 30 years. We have had two entirely new DSMs since this book was written, autism research has progressed exponentially, and we know more about animal and human brains than ever before. There is even a dog who has been taught to communicate with her owner in words!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4_B2...

I wonder what Hearne would have to say about Stella's dignity.

[Kali · Rating 5 out of 5]

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, day-to-day, 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 search-and-rescue 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.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hearne 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.

[Boria Sax · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difference without superiority is a difficult thing for many people to conceive of, but that is how Hearne sees our relations with animals. As a species, we are alienated, and animal training is a way to connect with other creatures, and the precise moves they execute are a measure of our success. It is a bold thesis, one about which she is understandably defensive, but which she argues well. The writing style idiosyncratically combines noble rhetoric with choppy rhythms, and it takes a while to get used to. But Hearne is elucidating philosophical nuances that can challenge the limits of language, and so she has developed an idiom that is all her own.

[Elizabeth Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Trina · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Sally · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't realize this book would be so heavy on philosophy. I guess I should have known better. The author is a professor of philosophy. She also trains dogs and horses. I would have liked more about animal behavior and less heavy philosophy.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to rate. On the one hand, it's genuinely thought-provoking: it took me longer to read than its length suggests not because the material is particularly difficult, but because I spent a lot of time thinking about it after reading it. Whether or not I agree with it is beside the point; it makes me think, and makes me consider the human relationship with domestic animals.

A number of Goodreads reviews of this book complain that it's heavy on the philosophical and literary references, and relatively light on the actual animal training. In my opinion, this is its strength--firstly, it seems mainly intended as a philosophy book, not a training book. I don't have the background in philosophy to comment on that aspect at any length, really--but it survives as an interesting and readable book in part because it isn't a training book. It's very, very much a product of its era on its training methods--and while there are still trainers today who worship Bill Koehler's methods and advocate for hard physical corrections (positive punishment) in dog training, a lot has changed since the mid-1980s in how people train dogs and write about canine cognition.

I enjoyed reading the book and thinking about its assertions. The idea that stories and language shape the way humans interact with dogs (and horses), what we expect of them and the standards to which we hold them, is fascinating. The interplay between morality and stories, the idea that animals uphold certain moral ideals and have a sense of a sacred (if not one precisely aligned with the human) is... controversial, at the very least, but it seems the book is more a reaction against the line of thought that suggested (and sometimes still suggests) that animals don't experience emotions and that anything that smells even slightly of anthropomorphism is anathema. This is far less common these days, but the book is a relic of its own era.

And in fairness to the perhaps rather romantic idea that underpins the book, maybe there's something to the idea that my own dog (and the previous dog of the same breed I've had before) would not respond too well to many of the (now) antiquated training methods described: he's not a bird dog from generations of dogs trained with check lines to turn him end-over-end to teach attention and ear pinches hard enough to elicit a vocalization to train a forced retrieve; he's a descendant of reindeer herders with an origin legend that says dogs and humans made an agreement once, long ago, to work together for mutual benefit and ascribing sometimes supernatural importance to the treatment of dogs. And of course, those stories also deal with language--with the idea that dogs could speak, but that not all humans retained the ability to understand them. It's a different story, and perhaps these differing stories have informed the traits different groups of humans have favored in selecting for and against certain canine temperaments (setting aside the fact that most modern breeds really are very modern inventions, and that dogs exist for themselves, too--what's the informing moral tale of a street dog unselected by any conscious human choice?). But that, too, isn't the point of the book.

Which is what I mean by this being a thought-provoking book. I can't really say whether it was "good" or not, or even whether I enjoyed it in a conventional sense--but certainly, it was stimulating. It's a good exercise in listening to a voice from another era that had very interesting things to say, while recognizing that yes, this is speaking from the not-so-distant past.

It's interesting.

[cait · Rating 1 out of 5]

vicki hearne is a cruel woman and she repulses me, i can't even think about the philosophy because she is just so backwards and hypocritical

[Agaricus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think about this book at least once a day.

[Al Maki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I became interested in the book when I came across a quote from her about whom dogs bite, an important question for me because our dog, who grew up feral, came to us without her bite response suppressed. Hearne was a trainer of working animals - horses and dogs - not pets, but animals with jobs. She was also a student of philosophy and linguistics and a poet. The book is about what light animal training can cast on philosophy and language and what they in turn may say about animal training. She argues that horses and dogs are conscious and intelligent beings who are capable of developing a working relationship with a human despite their cognitive and sensory apparatuses being quite different than ours. In fact she sees those differences as important opportunities. Since I share these ideas I found the book interesting: it draws on a wealth of personal knowledge and a lot of reading in animal training; on the philosophy side she has clearly given the matter a good deal of thought and study. And she's a capable writer.
Reading the book has made me rethink how to communicate with our own dog so it has value on the training side. However, without some background and interest in the philosophy of language, much of the book would appear meaningless and pointless.
Dogs bite people who are "contaminated with epistemology" which she describes elsewhere as "doubt about the sources and resources of meaningful resonances": some animals, some philosophy and some poetry, not your typical combination.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Ruth Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing is a little dense at times but the Hearne's ideas about animals were entirely worth the effort. I love animals, and realizing that they could be the subject of a philosopher's work was thrilling to me.

[Josh Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chapter 3 is 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.

[Laurel Braitman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book about our responsibilities to the animals that we love and might come to love us. Highly reccomend it.

[April Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating natural history that offers much insight into man's relationship with animals: wildlife, working animals and pets.

[Alexandra · Rating 1 out of 5]

Learning a lot about dogs and animals despite the self-indulgent "philosophy of language."

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.