Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name (Common Reader Editions)

Rating:
Summary: She can train them...
Review: What cheap criticism would be complete without a personal attack? I do not like Vicky Hearne for many reasons, but the main one is her pretentious assumptions about the mental processes of the animal. She can have any dialogue she wants running through her head while interacting with an animal, but it is arrogant to the extreme to impose it upon the animal's mind. This seems to contradict her belief that the animal must be approached with a respect for its "moral and intellectual capacities". To further this, she goes on about the contempt that animals feel towards being bribed or patronized. If animals were so morally enlightened, then they would be aware that walking away from a command "with a stiffness expressive of deep disgust" would perpetuate the contempt of the human, and possibly result in some decisive discipline involving a rifle. Hearne also devotes an unusually large amount of words to the topic of mental handicaps in humans. Obviously, she is providing a comparison to an animal's cognitive ability, but her rambling and hedging of the subject is plain annoying. Also annoying is her use of high rhetoric and continual name-dropping of venerable philosophers and writers. Yippee... she can read! Just saying the names "Plato", "Shakespeare", and "Nietzsche", does not exempt one from actually addressing their writings and how they relate to her points. She also disturbingly brings up, then hedges, around the term "Philia" (p 234), trying to define what others interpreted it as meaning, but ultimately going nowhere with it. Hmmm... perhaps something was on her mind at the time?