What Shamu Taught Me about Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers » (Unabridged)

Amy Sutherland is the author of Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched and Cookoff. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Her feature piece “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,” on which this book is based, was the most viewed and most e-mailed article of The New York Times online in 2006. Sutherland divides her time between Boston and Portland, Maine.

While observing exotic animal trainers for her acclaimed book Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched, journalist Amy Sutherland had an epiphany: What if she used these training techniques with the human animals in her own life–namely her dear husband, Scott? In this lively and perceptive book, Sutherland tells how she took the trainers’ lessons home.

The next time her forgetful husband stomped through the house in search of his mislaid car keys, she asked herself, “What would a dolphin trainer do?” The answer was: nothing. Trainers reward the behavior they want and, just as important, ignore the behavior they don’t. Rather than appease her mate’s rising temper by joining in the search, or fuel his temper by nagging him to keep better track of his things in the first place, Sutherland kept her mouth shut and her eyes on the dishes she was washing. In short order, Scott found his keys and regained his cool. “I felt like I should throw him a mackerel,” she writes. In time, as she put more training principles into action, she noticed that she became more optimistic and less judgmental, and their twelve-year marriage was better than ever.

What started as a goofy experiment had such good results that Sutherland began using the training techniques with all the people in her life, including her mother, her friends, her students, even the clerk at the post office. In the end, the biggest lesson she learned is that the only animal you can truly change is yourself.

Full of fun facts, fascinating insights, hilarious anecdotes, and practical tips, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage describes Sutherland’s Alice-in-Wonderland experience of stumbling into a world where cheetahs walk nicely on leashes and elephants paint with watercolors, and of leaving a new, improved Homo sapiens.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Amy Sutherland's What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage is a literary agent's dream: high concept, self help-y, and including the name of a cute performing whale in the title. What started as a New York Times "Modern Love" column (and one of the Times' most-emailed articles) got snapped up and has stretched into this thin, lighthearted book on applying the techniques of exotic animal trainers to human relationships. Sutherland's experience observing professionals in the field was so profound that, she claims in her introduction, "I have a peace of mind that comes from the world making so much more sense to me." (The money from a movie deal probably didn't hurt.) Along the way, she imparts some useful lessons, distilled from training philosophies. The mantra "It's never the animal's fault," for example, tells us that behavior is just behavior and that we shouldn't take it so personally. Another lesson gleaned is that nagging won't get you what you want. To illustrate this point, Sutherland mentions a few too many times her husband's habit of leaving his smelly bike clothes on the floor. Overall, her book offers a calming, less paranoid, and more detached view of romance and marriage than many relationship guides. So next time you find your mate's underwear on the kitchen table, just remember it's never the animal's fault. --Janet Steen

Introduction     xi
People Are Animals Too     3
Any Interaction Is Training     14
The Zen of Animal Training     29
Know Your Species     44
Why I Stopped Nagging     58
The How-tos of Positive Reinforcement     80
Baby Steps     100
The Least Reinforcing Scenario     115
The Joy of Incompatible Behaviors     129
Working with Big Cats     139
Epilogue: Life After Shamu     151
Acknowledgments     161
Glossary     165