Book/The Art of Raising a Puppy
The Art of Raising a Puppy
About
- Written by the Monks of New Skete, the monastic community in Cambridge, New York that breeds and trains German shepherds and supports itself partly by that work.
- Covers the decision to take a puppy on, choosing a breed, preparing a house, the stages of a puppy's development, how to communicate with it, basic obedience, and common trouble such as chewing, jumping up and paper-training.
- Follows the community's earlier book How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend. First published in 1991 and revised since.
A reading that may carry over to agent work
- The book is about dogs. What follows is a tentative reading of it, not a claim the authors make.
- Raising a puppy is presented as development over time rather than a set of commands issued once. Which stage the animal is at decides what it can learn; a correction means nothing unless it arrives at the moment of the act; consistency of handling counts for more than any single technique. The book is also direct about the handler's own behaviour being part of what forms the animal.
- Those are the parts that resemble instructing an AI agent under My/AI/Rule: what the thing can take in at this point, when feedback has to land to be understood, and how much of the result comes from the instructor being consistent.
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