Author Archive | Mary Hunter

Who really needs a fork?

My mother has been reading David Freeman Hawke’s Everyday Life in Early America. Here’s a quote she shared with me: Spoons were the essential utensil at the table. Knives, if they turned up, were pointed and used to spear food from the common serving dish. Forks did not appear until the eighteenth century. There were […]

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How to Praise a Fish

Many animal trainers that use positive reinforcement and operant conditioning rely on a clicker or a certain word (such as “Good!”) to mark correct behavior. The marker sound or word functions as a secondary reinforcer. When you give the signal, the animal knows it’s performed a good behavior and will get a reward (such as […]

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Time For Horses

I spent the better part of the afternoon sitting on the ground picking bunches of grass and feeding them to a big blue-eyed brown and white paint horse. He’s still not at all sure he wants to be my friend, but he started being convinced by the end of the session. I had a friend […]

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Phrenology for Horses?

When’s the last time you talked to someone about phrenology? Probably not very recently. Phrenology was a 19th century scientific philosophy for determining human personality traits based on reading bumps and fissures on the skull. Although this concept has been dismissed as pseudoscience, a small number of people believe that techniques such as these can […]

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Dog Whispering

Many people love Cesar Millan; there’s no doubt about that. He’s confident, well spoken, good looking, and seems to work miracles with problem dogs. However, while his techniques do seem to work, they might not be the best ones to use. Many professional dog trainers and animal behaviorists are opposed to Cesar Millan’s techniques because […]

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