Animal TrainerPower

Sit! (He sits.)

Stay! (She stays.)

Roll over! (Hmmm…half-way.)

Get your nose out of Granny’s crotch! (Eh—she doesn’t notice anyway.) Sure, there’s power when it comes to training animals—power over the animals, power over their owners who couldn’t manage them, the sense of power you get when teaching a fish to ride a bicycle—but being as you’re at the top of the food chain, the sense of influence you feel needs to be, well, tempered. Does it matter what type of animals you train and what you train them to do? Maybe. Teaching a bloodhound to track down missing children may be more noble than training an orangutan to jump rope, but you, going to bed with too big a sense of power, is…unseemly (at best).

When it comes to working and training animals, humility regarding the power you may or may not have is probably the prudent choice.