The Terrible Tenrec

When I was attending graduate school at the University of Washington around 1967, I received an invitation in the mail to subscribe to the charter issue of a new magazine. I usually throw such advertisements away, but this publisher evidently had a mailing list of People Who Suspect They Are Crazy. As I fit that description to a T (or maybe a Q), I immediately subscribed to Psychology Today, beginning with the first issue. (However, after I didn’t notice myself becoming any saner, and the magazine ceased publication for a few years, I didn’t continue subscribing or even reading the magazine.)At that period in my life, I was much taken with the work of the experimental psychologist B. F. Skinner and his work with operant conditioning. Skinner argued that positive reinforcement was a much more effective way to promote learning and positive behavior than punishment (negative reinforcement). “Behavior modification,” as he and his followers labeled his approach, interested me quite a bit. As a young parent with negative memories to how I had been raised, I seized on Skinnerian ideas as perhaps a better idea for how to approach my daughter’s upbringing and tried to use positive reinforcement as a general approach to parenting.

At the time, I thought I was a brilliant parent. Now I think (1) my bad tendencies and my wife’s bad tendencies tended to cancel each other out and (2) our daughter was a very bright and good-tempered child who figured out (a) she would not live very long with two parents who are not especially fond of children unless she was very good and (b) in regard to adults in general (such as teachers and adopted aunts), if she spoke politely and intelligently to them, and did whatever she was supposed to do (such as school work) before it was due, adults would usually let her do whatever she wanted to do.

An early issue of Psychology Today featured an article titled The Terrible Tenrec. I long ago lost my copy of the issue and I haven’t been able to find a copy of the article, though I suspect if I spend some time and money on that as a goal I can track it down. At the moment, I will depend on very uncertain memory from about 40 years ago (supplemented by a little googling).

The article and my recent googling told me that tenrecs are (a) small omnivorous mammals that mostly eat insects; (b) live mostly on the African island of Madagascar; (c) are related to almost no other known mammals but in their isolated habitat evolved to fit various ecological niches so that various tenrecs species have been compared to hedgehogs, shrews, opossums, moles, and otters; d) tend to be bad tempered and uncooperative.

In terms of their temperament, the article indicated tenrecs (1) do not make good pets and (2) are not good subjects for psychological experimentation. Apparently experimental psychologists had tried to do experiments on tenrecs (similar to the ones that Skinner used to do on pigeons and rats) and found they were completely uncooperative and almost completely resistant to operant conditioning. (As I had already begun to have doubts about my enthusiasm of Skinner’s “Behavior Modification” approach to psychology, I suspected that the tenrecs were trying to tell me something.)

I am not sure why it ever occurred to experimental psychologists to consider trying to train tenrecs (given how many pigeons and rats are in easy reach), but I suspect experimental psychologists are the very archetype of mad scientists.

Both my wife and I are very uncooperative and probably highly resistant to behavior modification. My wife is very conscientious about doing things that need to be done-in fact, I suspect she probably has one of the largest superegos you’re likely to encounter in everyday life.  She almost always does what she is supposed to do…as long as she regards it as her own idea. However, she detests anyone else (such as her spouse) telling her what to do. (I, on the other hand, am just plain uncooperative. I not only don’t cooperate with my wife, I don’t cooperate with myself).

My wife is also short-tempered. When she becomes irritated with me (generally about every other day), she lets me know about it in a very sharp way. In fact, I often feel like I have sharp barbs in my skin. I have two nicknames for my wife. One is chickadee (as in the W. C. Fields/Mae West movie, My Little Chickadee). After I read the article in PT, I also began to call her my Terrible Tenrec.

Thinking about it, probably I am just as much of a tenrec as my wife. I have a bad temper and have been known to snap at people. I have had about eleven full time jobs during my life as well as about 20 more part-time and supplementary jobs and I have found myself in conflict and controversy in most of them. Most of my former bosses would consider they were letting me off easy if they only described me as a tenrec.

Of the various species of tenrecs, two are apparently well known as particularly unsuited to be pets. A web page about problems with importing tenrecs described these difficult and troublesome varieties

The streaked tenrec, although cute, carries “barbed quills that are detachable like a porcupine quill. As a defense, these animals can drive their quills into a person or animal.”

The common or tailless tenrec is the “largest of the tenrecs at 2.5 kilograms. It can inflict serious damage with a powerful bite.”

It’s OK to look at them on a blog, but don’t try to keep one as a pet. For that matter, with such difficult creatures as parents, I am not sure how my daughter survived to grow up, much less turn into a fairly nice person, at least most of the time.

Tags: behaviorism, Skinner