Potty training with the whales

That's a whale peeing, in case it wasn't clear
That's a whale peeing, in case it wasn't clear

“Chuck Tompkins, whale trainer, has often been asked the question “how can you get a killer whale to urinate on cue, and I can’t get my son to pee in the toilet?”

Who hasn’t asked themselves this very same question?

The above is from a short article from MyFox 25 in New Hampshire, entitled “Training whales & parenting link?”

Enquiring minds want to know.

An admission: JP is now 3 and a half years old and is only now approaching fully potty-trained.

I imagine that getting divorced hasn’t helped the process of getting him to take “big boy poops,” but that can’t really be controlled. It certainly means that there isn’t any sort of coherent strategy to get him out of diapers. Mostly we’ve just gone along at his pace, communicating through attorneys, occasionally flinging rocks at each other, and figuring he would just start doing it on his own. Ah, adulthood.

There is actually a technical term for this type of potty-training. It’s called procrastination.

By the way, the inspiration for this post, and the article quoted above, is something called Learn With Shamu potty training which purports to apply the very same “simple methods used to teach positive behaviors to Shamu” to your little one. No word on whether or not this includes aim.

Oh, and for the pervs out there (like me), here’s a link to the photo I didn’t use for this post.

Published by Theodore

Theodore Ross is an editor of Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Saveur, Tin House, the Mississippi Review, and (of course), the Vietnam News. He grew up in New York City by way of Gulfport, MS, and as a teen played the evil Nazi, Toht, in Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. He lives with his son, J.P. in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a book about Crypto-Jews.

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