‘What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage’

For my second book I followed students at Moorpark College's Exotic Animal Training and Management Program, the Harvard University for animal trainers, for one year. I walked away with not only a California tan, a new respect for scavengers, and more than enough material for a book, but something I never expected--a whole new approach to life.

While I worked on that book, I droned on to friends and family, anyone who would hold still for thirty seconds, of the great wisdom I had found at the feet of animal trainers. My friends, who had listened to me rattle on about how to cube meat for competitive chili while I wrote "Cookoff," nodded good-humoredly and, I suspect, thought to themselves, "There she goes again." Sometimes they'd interrupt me to ask "When is your book due?" in hopes the deadline was not far off and that I'd soon be on to another topic.

My husband, who, like me, loves animals and knows his fair share about training, was far more receptive, and didn't even make fun of me when I began tossing about terms like "incompatible behavior" or "instinctive drift." But not even he really understood at first what I was up to--that I had begun to use the animal training techniques, only I was using them on my fellow species, and on no one more than my handsome husband.

Eventually, I wrote a column for The New York Times about how I had improved my marriage by thinking like an animal trainer. To my surprise, the whole world sat up and took notice. After being ignored by my friends, I was suddenly besieged with interview requests from around the globe--Brazil, Ireland, Spain, Canada. Four reporters called me from Australia alone. My in-box filled up with congratulatory e-mails. I landed on the "Today" show. Hollywood called. My column shot to the top of the list of most e-mailed stories at the Times, where it remained for days, then weeks, and eventually became the most e-mailed story of 2006. When the dust settled, I had a movie deal and a contract to make my Times column into a book.

I never expected to write this book, or anything like it. But then I never expected that animal training would transform me. I'm not a counselor or a minister or a trainer or an expert of any kind. I'm a journalist. What I have to offer is my own personal story as a kind of Alice who stumbled into a Wonderland where cheetahs walk on leashes, hyenas pirouette on command, and baboons skateboard, and left with a new outlook on marriage, men, humans, life. My experience may give you some food for thought, a laugh, a light dose of philosophy, a way to solve some small problems that aren't worth a visit to the shrink but still nag. Or it may change you from head to toe.

The world is full of surprises. The proof is before me.

With the whale's snout under his feet, the trainer pulls his arms flush to his sides as Shamu pushes him through the water. It is a magical sight, even more so as the twosome zooms past the webcam. The trainer's head cuts through the water and comes into view first. Now I can see the trainer is a woman. A blond ponytail streams down her back. Her face turned forward, she looks like a ship's figurehead. A trail of small bubbles escapes from the corner of her mouth. Her straight, horizontal body follows. Then I see her feet, which are still neatly balanced on the rostrum of the ocean's top predator. Shamu's sleek two-ton bulk fills the camera's lens and then disappears. Though I can't see the pair, I know what they are doing, bursting from the tank like water gods at whom a stadium of onlookers will scream and clap and marvel, like me at my desk, at what seems impossible but isn't.

Excerpted from "What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, And Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers" by Amy Sutherland Copyright © 2007 by Amy Sutherland. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2008