Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name


Posted on Jun 5, 2008
By Zoe Lojical

by Vicki Hearne

Skyhorse Publishing, 288 pages, $14.95

Available on Amazon.com

I discovered this book while browsing animal training books in a long-ago bookstore on the ground floor of the World Trade Center. The book is still very much with me. I mean, there I was, looking for helpful hints on training my cat, who already knew how to "shake" paws with me (how cute!), and up turns this deft, book-long argument couched in classical rhetoric - on animal training. Who knew?

So I bought the book and read it. Slowly. A book-long academic document about a (normally) non-academic subject, it is not your regular page-turner. The author, the late Vicki Hearne, was an academic and an animal trainer who integrated the two pursuits into one career and fervently believed in the partnership of human and domestic animal.

In this passage, Hearne - an Airedale lover who became an outspoken advocate of the Pit Bull in print and on film - begins to parse philosophy, which she practiced at Yale and Stanford, and animal training:

. . . . I would leave the university [in the afternoon] to work with a dog or so and any horses that had been left out of the morning schedule. Here, in the various training arenas, the discourse was radically different. It was, as I have said, anthropomorphic, "morally loaded," as it has always been in the great training manuals. By this I mean that implicit as well as explicit in the trainers' language is the notion that animals are capable not only of activities requiring "IQ" - a rather arid conception - but also of a complex and delicate (though not infallible) moral understanding that is so inextricably a function of their relationships with human beings that it may well be said to constitute those relationships.

And here's her footnote, an academic device not common in books about pets:

By "moral understanding" I mean that as far as a trainer is concerned a dog is perfectly capable of understanding that he ought not to pee on the bedpost even though he might want to. Characterizing the dog's own formulations of this understanding is a separate matter. To say what I've just said is, of course, to make a claim about the nature of moral understanding.  

Nothing cute here. And this is just the introduction.

And yet this highly clausal and phrasal equivocating unfurls a seductive argument that, in the relationship between us and our animals, domestication is a two-way street. That animals, especially dogs, bring their own moral sense to our every domestic meeting with them subverts the more silly-ass notions some of us have about "pets." In staying at the level of "cute," we comfortably keep them as "poor dumb animals." What worlds of being did I leave out in so carefully, even lovingly, circumscribing my animals with the single term "pet"?

I exaggerate only a little in claiming the argument of Adam's Task was as new to me as being attacked on a clear blue day would become. I'd wondered what kind of weird inter-species vibe led some animals in their wisdom to choose us, out of all the other species, to be domesticated with. Adam's Task demands we consider the obligation we take on by acquiescing to that choice. I've re-read the book and will circle back to it again in a year or two because there's real pleasure in reading writing as skilled as the thinking it explicates.
 
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