Almost every pet owner in the world knows exactly what their animals are thinking and feeling most of the time - so why don't professional animal trainers and behaviorists? Well, because behaviorists work from a different set of definitions and may be a bit more precise in their "science".
I was at the local exotic bird club last week (my first visit) and we had a professional trainer/behaviorist as a speaker. She was going along and said something like, "we don't know why the animal does this, but we do know what he is doing". And, of course, someone in the audience wanted to tell her exactly what the bird was thinking and how to solve the problem!
Apparently, "When your bird screams whenever the telephone rings, what you should do is have the person who called talk to the bird. The bird was just confused about why you talk to a little box and screams because it doesn't know what is going on. By having the person on the phone talk to the bird, the bird then understands telephones and won't scream anymore."
Now, a professional bird trainer would never have come up with that solution with that reasoning. They would not have thought, "Oh, if I just explain what a telephone is, the bird won't scream any more." They would have gone through a process of determining what behavior was being observed, what appeared to be triggering the behavior, what were the consequences of the behavior, what is reinforcing the behavior, and then design a plan for changing or eliminating the behavior.
Behavior: anything that the animal does that you can see.
Soap Box: a platform for saying stuff loudly that you think other people need to hear (e.g., my blog).
Expert: someone with a convincing opinion to share.
Professional: someone who gets paid for it.
I own pets - but I also train animals. And, in training situations, I like being constrained to what I can observe (or intuit). I don't know what the animal is thinking or feeling. Body language may tell me how the animal is acting and what the likely consequences of my behavior might be. What the animal is thinking might be interesting - or even important - but not something I can know. I can't do it with people and I can't do it with animals.
I do a fair amount of public speaking. Sometimes, I will say, "Now, I know what some of you are thinking..." But, I don't really mean it. I don't know. I might have a guess based on what people have told me in the past that a certain number of people in a crowd this size might be thinking a certain way - it happens and anticipating it might have a benefit.
I learned long ago that, "If I just explain it to them, they will see..." doesn't always work. And, it certainly doesn't work with my parrots or dogs or employees. The best way for me is really to reinforce the behavior I want and not reinforce the behavior I don't. "I don't like your attitude" doesn't work - certainly not with a parrot.
Pet psychics abound - a good trainer is hard to find.
