Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name

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 Even so, as this was originally released in 1986, some parts feel grossly outdated (I've noted strange bits about both pit bulls and autism below), and that makes this hard to rate; my inner needle is wavering between two and four stars and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.

This is the first of the books that I was led to by 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List that hasn't really worked for me - and I honestly don't know if it hasn't weathered very well or if it's just not that good and I'm too intimidated to cry out that the Emperor has no clothes. Surely if James Mustich put other books on his list (The Da Vinci Code, Gone Girl) that I don't think of as high literature, I don't have to nod along with the genius of his other picks without appearing too dim to understand them properly?

Bonus material: Vicki Hearne discusses Adam's Task in this video of an interview from the time. And one of Hearne's poems:

The Claim of Speech

BY VICKI HEARNE

for Stanley Cavell

I

Must we mean what we say? Stick to it,

Be bound to, chained up beside the house,

Teased by boys on bicycles, fireflies,

The seasons as they pass out of reach?

We could try meaning nothing, a way

Favored in the brightest corridors

By those who pass from life to death through

Halls of learning and replace marriage

With justice. To mean nothing is to

Have nothing at heart, to be chained up

To the right of and a bit behind

The body: without marriage, justice

Prevails as the clenched hand of culture

On the most brutal bridle prevails

Against the motion beneath that wants

To claim the hand of culture. Against

The Horse in the horse, the Rider in

The rider, the heart beneath the tongue.

II

In the anarchies of the sensuous

Hands the order of love is leaping.

In a far corner of the landscape

A lover’s hands leap in the skin’s light,

And heroes’ hands lap like tongues on necks

Curved with significance. The horses

Stamp and whinny, hint of caprioles

As urgently as our mute souls

And it is impossible to mean

Anything but motion. A dispatch

From the graceful landscape will arrive:

“He must be told.” Lovers will obey

Thus leaving terror and time alone

To fend for themselves. I will obey,

Am obeying now, making poems

From chains, leaving the season alone—

You must be told (already your horse

Leaps beneath you!) what you meant to say.