There have been numerous recent social media posts about Karen Pryor, acclaimed animal trainer and founder of Karen Pryor Academy, one of the best dog and animal training education programs in existence. She passed a few days ago and many, many trainers have posted moving tributes to her as a person and a professional, and about the lives she improved through her work. So many species and individuals taught in kind and effective ways, rooted in Karen Pryor’s marine mammal training experience and explored in her book that popularized clicker training. I, like others, am the trainer I am today in part because of her work.
I got into training through zoo keeping many years ago. Karen Pryor’s seminal book on animal training, Don’t Shoot the Dog, was the first on training I and others read as young/new zookeepers. Through it, I figured out how to train needed behaviors to a number of animals in my care, such as capybara, llamas, a donkey and ponies. Aside from a couple of dog training classes with my own dogs, the book was my introduction to positive reinforcement-based training, operant conditioning, and applied behavior analysis. I didn’t have to use coercive or aversive methods because I started my training career with Karen Pryor and Don’t Shoot the Dog. I didn’t have to relearn how to train, as many trainers who had used aversives did, I just needed to learn more about how behavior and learning work, and get better at the mechanics of training.
As someone who has always worked with multiple species, what has been most moving to me regarding Karen Pryor is the experience of people becoming better parents and helping their children through the kind and effective teaching strategies enumerated in Don’t Shoot the Dog. The book may have had its start in Karen Pryor’s marine mammal training experience but includes examples of teaching and learning related to many species, including humans. And so it remains relevant to parents and children today. A friend of mine from college who was a single mother to four children was recommended Don’t Shoot the Dog from a therapist at a point where she was struggling with the kids and sought help. A trainer friend describes how the book and her subsequent positive reinforcement-based training journey helped her to become a better parent to her child as well.
Karen Pryor was a luminary in the field of animal training. But she didn’t come to it on her own. Her work had its derivation in the laboratory of famed psychologist and behaviorist B.F. Skinner, as he demonstrated the universal mechanisms of behavior change with rats and pigeons. Following their work as students of Skinner, applied animal behaviorists and psychologists Keller and Marian Breland adapted positive reinforcement strategies beyond the laboratory. And, eventually, those made their way to the world of marine mammal training and dog training.
Effective teaching or training or conditioning or whatever you want to call it is powerful. It is humane and kind, and honors the individual. It respects behavior in and of itself, as something we all do with our species-typical and individually unique variations. It eschews pseudoscience, magical thinking and fictional narratives, because those muddy the waters of how behavior and learning work, and dishonor the behaving and learning that we all do. They distract from what is actually occurring. Never doubt that B.F. Skinner’s work has changed the world for the better through his students and theirs and so on. The ripples continue.
