How to make him behave

BT Woman

Martin Clunes starred in the hit TV show 'Men Behaving Badly'

A new book claims to reveal how you can use animal training techniques to get your spouse to clean up his act - and all without him even knowing it. By Ann Dermody

Friday, March 28, 2008

In 2006, while writing a book on a school for exotic animal trainers in California, Amy Sutherland had an epiphany of sorts. Watching skilled teachers coax everything from lions, cranes and killer whales to do the humans' bidding, all for a hunk of meat or a mackerel, she wondered if the same techniques could be applied to her husband Scott's more annoying personal traits.

So the next time Scott mislaid his keys, or threw his smelly work-out clothes on the floor, instead of fussing around after him and helping him search or nagging like she usually did, Sutherland did nothing.

Trainers, she'd learned, reward behaviour they want and ignore the behaviour they don't want. It worked.

Her husband eventually found his keys and harmony reigned instead of escalating into a full-blown row that usually happened between the two of them.

While she never tossed him a slippery fish as reward, Sutherland soon had the oblivious Scott trained up like a pet baboon and was applying the same rules to friends and family that the trainers of dolphins, hyenas and flamingos do when they want to teach them a new trick.

Within a short time her interactions with humans became preceded by the mantra, 'What would an exotic animal trainer do?' That included the post office worker giving her a hard time or a relative she might be having a quarrel with.

Then Sutherland wrote a New York Times article revealing her discoveries — it became the most read and emailed of the year.

Within a week she was on mainstream American morning shows, interviewed by journalists from all over the world, and had a movie and book deal in the bag.

That book, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love And Marriage, has just been released in the US. Shamu, for the record, is a killer whale who performs daily at SeaWorld in San Diego.

It's not exactly a self-help book, rather one that reveals how we might best enhance relationships with our favourite species, whether they're the two or four-legged variety. Not that Sutherland is without retractors. She admits she's had some irate emails from men who accused her of manipulating and demeaning her husband by comparing him to an animal.

That, she says, is a moot point because humans are animals and she's never met "a man who minded being compared to a lion or tiger, even a bear" .

There also seems to be a soft spot for dolphins. She says most of the men she's dated couldn't compare to a dolphin, who, with their athleticism and brains she calls the 'Kennedys of the animal kingdom'.

It wasn't just poor Scott who came under her keen trainer's eye. Friends, relatives and strangers in the street were subjected to the lessons too.

The purpose she says was not to bend people to doing her will, rather to improve her relationships and see where people were coming from.

So what happened when the poor unsuspecting Scott discovered what she'd been doing?

Well, Sutherland says, he didn't get too annoyed but later on she realised the animal had started to train the trainer and Scott started to apply the same tactics to curb her own nasty habits ...