Few books have changed they way I think in such a radical way as this book have. Even though I thought I had grasped what "clicker training" was before, I now realize I was more or less just training with a clicker, not clicker training. Yes I did shape behaviors from scratch, and I believe I have good timing when using the clicker, but it was like things fell into place when I read this book.
By reading this book I've learned more about in which situations training with a conditioned reinforcer (like the clicker) is the way to go, and in which situations it might be wiser to use a primary reinforcer (such as food) directly. I've learned much more about the role of raising the criteria and to be consistent with what you click for. I've learned that you actually don't have to wait until an animal offers a behavior reliably without a cue, before you can add the cue (something I never were completely able to wait for, but my dog still learned so I just accepted that maybe I wasn't such a good clicker trainer). But according to Karen Pryor, you don't need to wait with the cue, and she is the person that developed clicker training into what it is today!
Personally, the most important thing this book taught me (for me as a biologist/physiologist) was the neurobiological explanations of how and why clicker training works and what it does in the brain. This might sound boring, but reading about it was anything but. In the books I've read before (written by Norwegian clicker trainers), the theory behind clicker training has been explained using mostly "psychology"-language. I am, how should I put this, skeptical to a lot of the theories put forward in the field of psychology. I often find them un-scientific. So even if I saw that clicker training worked, like they said it would, I didn't do it wholeheartedly. I didn't "love" it. I often still trained with luring, not that I will stop that altogether now, but I will definitely use clicker training more.
Another mindset that was completely changed for me after reading this book, was that I realized that I don't need to get another dog to get an other animal to clicker train. Right now I'm thinking of getting a couple of gerbils to practice my clicker training skills on. We'll see if I actually do it, but it was really a long time since I felt this inspired!
This is definitely a book I can recommend to anybody, whether or not they train animals. The author manages to talk about this relatively narrow field in a way that makes it interesting for everybody. All of her stories about training all kinds of animals, from hermit crabs to dolphins, are really entertaining at the same time as they are educational. She even writes about the human equivalent to clicker training, namely TAGteach.
If there is one book you should read this summer, I believe it should be this one!
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