Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name - Softcover

Hearne, Vicki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1510704299 ISBN 13: 9781510704299

Publisher: Skyhorse, 2016

Synopsis

A groundbreaking meditation on our human-animal relationships and the moral code that binds it.

Adam's Task, Vicki Hearne’s innovative masterpiece on animal training, brings our perennial discussion of the human-animal bond to a whole new metaphysical level. Based on studies of literary criticism, philosophy, and extensive hands-on experience in training, Hearne asserts, in boldly anthropomorphic terms, that animals (at least those that interact more with humans) are far more intelligent than we assume. In fact, they are capable of developing an understanding of "the good," a moral code that influences their motives and actions.

Drawing on an eclectic range of influences Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, Disney animal trainer William Koehler, and Genesis from the Bible, among others Hearne writes in contemplative, exploratory, and brilliant prose as she interweaves personal anecdotes with philosophy. Hearne develops an entirely new system of animal training that contradicts modern animal behavioral research and that, as her examples show, is astonishingly effective.

Widely praised, highly influential, and now with a new foreword by New York Times bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler, Adam’s Task will make every trainer, animal psychologist, and animal-lover stop, think, and question.

About this title

From the Publisher:

From "AUDUBON MAGAZINE," which chose it as one of the thirteen most significant books about nature publishing during the last hundred yers, to Susan Sontag, who hailed it as a "fascinating, incisive work of moral imagination," admirers of "Adam's Task" have praised it is one of our era's most original and brilliant books about language, domestic animals (dogs, cats, horses), and ourselves. Drawing on the discourses of philosophy and animal training, Vicki Hearne makes a case, in boldly anthromorphic terms, for attributing to the creatures we love, train, and play with, the potential for a "moral understanding" of their relationship to us--the potential, in other words, for nobility and dignity. With a new introduction by Donald McCaig.

From the Author:

Vicki Hearne was an accomplished scholar of linguistics, literature, philosophy, and behavioral psychology as well as a poet. She was a professor at Yale University and operated a dog-training school for years in Westbrook, Connecticut.

Donald McCaig, the author of Jacob’s Ladder, Rhett Butler’s People, and Canaan. He and his wife, Anne, work a sheep farm in the western mountains of Virginia.

Karen Joy Fowler is a New York Times' bestselling author of six novels, including The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are Completely Beside Ourselves, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1510704299
• ISBN 13: 9781510704299
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296