Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us about All Animals

From the founder of “clicker” training, the widely praised humane approach to shaping animal behavior, comes a fascinating book—part memoir, part insight into how animals and people think and behave.

A celebrated pioneer in the field of no-punishment animal training, Karen Pryor is responsible for developing clicker training—an all-positive, safe, effective way to modify and shape animal behavior—and she has changed the lives of millions of animals. Practical, engrossing, and full of fascinating stories about Pryor’s interactions with animals of all sorts, Reaching the Animal Mind presents the sum total of her life’s work. She explains the science behind clicker training, how and why it works, and offers step-by-step instructions on how you can clicker-train any animal in your life.

For bonus video clips, slide shows, articles, downloadable exercises, and links expanding on the contents of the book, go to ReachingtheAnimalMind.com.

Karen Pryor is a behavioral biologist with an international reputation in marine mammal biology and behavioral psychology. She is a founder and leading proponent of “clicker training,” a training system based on operant conditioning and the all-positive methods developed by marine mammal trainers. In addition to her bestselling Don’t Shoot the Dog!, Pryor is the author of Nursing Your Baby, as well as several other books and many sci- entific papers and articles on learning and behavior. Karen has three grown children and lives in Boston with two clicker-trained dogs and a clicker- trained cat.