05 AprEpisode 138 | Training wisdom from page 9 of Dr. Bob Bailey’s website (Plus: Join Annie for a film screening and Q and A with Dr. Bailey on April 24th)
Bonus episode! Annie reads some casually-written but oh-so-important training tips from the website belonging to Dr. Bob Bailey, behavior1.com. Annie will be showing Dr. Bailey's film on the history of his company, Animal Behavior Enterprises, and the history of operant conditioning, and then hosting a conversation with Dr. Bailey, on April 24th at 4PM Eastern. Sign up at http://schoolforthedogs.com/bailey
Dr. Bob Bailey is an animal trainer, inventor, designer, writer, teacher, diver, and photographer. He is the widower of B.F. Skinner's graduate student, Dr. Marian Breland Bailey. All proceeds from the screening will go to the Marian Breland Bailey Memorial Fund at Arkansas' Henderson State University.
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Mentioned in this episode:
More about Patient Like The Chipmunks
Dr. Sophia Yin's video about Chicken Camp with Dr. Bob Bailey from 2000
Transcript:
Annie:
Bob Bailey, or I should say Dr. Bob Bailey, is a trainer who lives in Arkansas, and I'm kind of obsessed with him. He was both business partner and husband to Marian Breland Bailey, also Dr. Marian Breland Bailey, who together with her first husband, Keller Breland and Bob Bailey who came to work with them before Keller's untimely death in the early 1960s, the three of them built this company called Animal Behavior Enterprises, which did so many really unique things in the realm of animal training. They train animals mostly for commercial purposes to do things that we're pretty incredible.
One thing they did was create these kind of like, I guess maybe you call it like a diorama with moving parts in it for animals. And they train like over a hundred different species of animals, but like an animal in this Lucite, basically Skinner box, they would train these animals to do all kinds of crazy funny tricks, like play basketball, play baseball, dance, play tic-tac-toe.
And I actually, and then they would ship these all around the world, and I actually grew up at, the arcade that I used to go to as a kid in Manhattan had a dancing chicken and a tic-tac-toe playing chicken that I was pretty obsessed with. Actually my whole family, we all loved the tic-tac-toe chicken and would discuss the tic-tac-toe chicken. Never in my childhood did I think about where this chicken came from and whether the chicken was actually trained or how it was trained totally did not cross my mind.
I guess if I thought about it, I would have thought the dancing chicken was like being electrocuted and that's why it was jumping or something, although I was completely off base. Anyway, these amusements were part of what Animal Behavior Enterprises did among other things, which included training animals for the military, training animals for film.
I first really started to learn about Bob Bailey in 2016 when I went to chicken training camp. I went to a one week of what is actually a five week program. This program that was initially started by Bob Bailey and is now taught unfortunately not very regularly, I think by Parvene Farhoody, who is a trainer also in New York City.
And anyway, I learned so much from the one week session. I would have gladly done the five week session if I could have justified taking that time off of work. The idea being basically if you can train a chicken, you can train any animals because the laws of learning, operant conditioning, classical conditioning, all of this is not species specific. And when you're working with a chicken, you're working with an animal that cannot be physically manipulated, does not respond well to punishment. And we train them to do incredible things.
During the session I did, it was about differentiation. So we were learning how to train a chicken to differentiate between different shapes, different colors. And anyway, if you ever get a chance to train and get chicken, especially with Parvene Farhoody or Bob Bailey, do. So I started first learning about Bob Bailey there and quickly understood that I was studying with a student of of his the, the incredible Parvene, and that Bob Bailey was kind of a student of the Brelands, including his late wife who later became Marianne Berlin Bailey. And they were the first graduate students of BF Skinner in his lab in the days before he went to Harvard.
The Brelands worked on his project pigeon, which was an effort to train pigeons to guide kamikaze missiles. If you listened to the bonus on the history of my brief history of dog training, the bonus episode last week, I talked a little bit about that and about the Brelands in general. Anyway, so I understood, I was in this direct lineage of people who have touched people who were touched by BF Skinner, who, as you will know, if you listen to this podcast, is a hero of mine.
So I've been trying to get Bob Bailey on the podcast to talk to him about Animal Behavior Enterprises’ history. And we actually agreed to do something that is so exciting. I'm so excited to be sharing this with you all. What we're going to do is screen the short film he has called Patient like the Chipmunks, which talks about the history of operant conditioning and Animal Behavior Enterprises and his work and his work with the Brelands. And then we are going to have a live conversation after that, including time for a Q and a on April 24th at 4:00 PM Eastern.
I will post a link to the show notes, but you can sign up schoolforthedogs.com/Bailey. It is going to be $10, a total steal. I think you can buy this video by itself on his website for, I think like $40. All the proceeds will be going to the Marian Breland Bailey fund at Henderson university in Arkansas, Marian Breland Bailey scholarship fund. So I hope that you'll join us. And I thought for the weeks between now and then once a week, if I can, I'm going to just read something either by the Brelands or by Bob Bailey that I have I learned from.
Today, I want to read a page from Bob's website, which you must go to. It's like an artifact. I don't think it's been touched since 2000, maybe. It's like old looking, but like in the best way. And I found among other things I love on this site there's an entire page devoted to Ukranian eggs, and how to decorate Ukrainian eggs. I don't know why, I guess Dr. Bob Bailey is really into Ukrainian eggs. Anyway it's behavior1.com.
The page I'm going to read is behavior1.com/page9.html, which is a very bright yellow page that inexplicably has a tiny parrot in the corner holding an American flag. Anyway, I found this page a few months ago and thought, Oh, wow, there's so much important stuff on this webpage that you could print it out and put all of this on on a business card. It's that concise. Well, maybe, maybe an index card, and I think incredibly useful for any dog trainer. I printed it out and hung it up by my desk.
And I'm just gonna read you this short little webpage, maybe it's 500 words long. It's called suggestions for better training and was written by Dr. Bob Bailey and Dr. Marian Breland Bailey:
.1 Training is a mechanical skill practice training procedures without the animal. Practice clicking. Practice giving the food toy or praise. Practice moving and training at the same time. Practice, practice, practice, then train the animal.
.2 Think, plan do. These are three separate behaviors. Don't mix them. First let your imagination soar. Consider every training idea without concern for practicality. Next, filter out the wild impractical schemes and build a detailed doable pathway to the desired behavior. Finally, carry out your plan.
.3 Training is simple, but not easy. Training should be the application of simple principles. Your demands on the animal plus the animal's own wants and needs can make training complex. The more complex the behavioral task, the more vague your direction, the more complicated the training. Simplify each step of training, give unambiguous direction and precise reinforcements. Most trainers should be behavioral splitters rather than lumpers.
.4 Solving behavioral problems. Look for simple solutions rather than complexity. Consider first problems of timing, criteria, rate of reinforcement. Timing. In casual training, clicker timing is forgiven. In precision training, clicker timing is not forgiving. You get what you click, not what you want. Imprecise timing of reinforcement clicking is by far the most frequent trainer error in the experience of the Brelands and the Bailey's.
Criteria. Trainers should decide in advance of the behavior what will and will not be reinforced. If the trainer waits until the behavior occurs before deciding the click will invariably be late and inconsistent.
Rate of reinforcement. Training must be worthwhile for all, for the animal and for the trainer, the animal must get something it wants or needs. The trainer must get behavior or some other satisfaction out of training. Reinforce often, especially early in training.
.5 ratios. Don't use a ratio in training unless you need to. The trainer has a choice. Ratios are overused and often improperly used. Properly used continuous reinforcement plus fluency training, give moderately strong and very precise behavior. Reserve ratios for highly repetitive, long duration, or other special behaviors.
.6 Primary reinforcement and reinforcers. Food, play, social and other stimuli filling a need or want may be useful in training. The primary reinforcer strengthens behavior. It can matter what when and how the primary reinforcement is delivered. As much thought should go into the delivery of the primary reinforcer as goes into the secondary or bridge. Click for action, feed for position.
Sign up for this screening in conversation April 24th at 4:00 PM Eastern with me and the one and only Dr. Bob Bailey. Hope to see you there. Just $10, and you can get there at schoolforthedogs.com/Bailey. I'll also put a link in the show notes. I'm also going to link to the webpage behavior1.com/page9. And also I will link to a really nice short little video that the late Dr. Sophia Yin did interviewing Dr. Bob Bailey in the early 2000s about chicken camp.
And you can look forward to another reading from the Bailey, Breland Bailey, Breland canon next week.
