“It's refreshing to think simply, to boil things down to just behaviour instead of always big psychological things,” the 49-year-old says. She and her husband had briefly gone to marriage therapy at their five-year mark. “We were never in big danger. For us, it was the sort of thing that happens to a lot of people, just the general wear and tear on a relationship, all these kinds of slightly negative, squabbly interactions.”
Ms. Sutherland acknowledges that many people use such techniques without being schooled in the art of animal training. “Teachers, parents, good bosses, a lot of people didn't have to go to the zoo to figure this out, but I did,” she says.
Dressed in a business-like suit, Ms. Sutherland is highly professional, well-trained in the practice of answering questions directly and making sure that she is being clear. “Does that sound like crazy talk?” she asks after confessing that the lasting insight she had gained is that “we are part of the web of life.”
But beneath the tidy grooming, she is as enthusiastic as a golden retriever, bounding off on tangents and making jokes about her work. “I am cannibalizing my own life. There's not going to be anything left,” she says. Was she nervous about how to turn a 1,700-word article into a book? “Oh yeah,” she guffaws. “I was scared to death.”
She is not afraid to bark a few opinions. Of criticism from men that the book suggests a scary, postfeminist world in which women house-train their partners like pets, she says, “I'm disappointed by it. I would like some fresh criticism … People boil [the book] down to something it's not, and also they misunderstand. I've used these principles to improve my marriage. I did not train Scott to sit and stay. People don't get it because they are not aware that animal training has changed. Trainers use it as communication. It's not a dominant relationship; it's a respectful relationship.”
Still, I notice that she reins herself in during exchanges with the waiter, maintaining a calm, professional demeanour.
Which may be because she understands the consequences of annoying her server. She once worked as a waitress, and if a customer snapped at her, whined or drank too much, she would say nothing but, secretly, in the kitchen, she would exact her revenge. For them, she would purposely pour coffee into mugs that had dried up globs of clam chowder stuck to the bottom. “I'd be sure to keep their cups topped off, appearing extra attentive, so that they would not see what lurked at the bottom,” she writes in her book.
She may not have understood the animal-training principle at work back then. But now she does. Punishment can provoke unwanted behaviours.
