21 MayEpisode 151 | Training animals outside the Skinner box: Dr. Bob Bailey on the origins of the use of operant conditioning in the commercial realm and beyond
Dr. Bob Bailey first started training animals professionally more than six decades ago, when he was hired by the military to train dolphins at sea. On that job, he first crossed paths with a couple whose work he'd read read about: Keller and Marian Breland. The Brelands had learned how to use operant conditioning to train animals while working as graduate students in BF Skinner's lab at the university of Minnesota, and were the first to bring the technology out of the lab. Keller's guide to using operant conditioning to train dolphins majorly influenced the career of Karen Pryor, who would later work to bring these force-free methods to dog owners. Dr. Bailey would joined forces with them, and eventually helmed their business, Animal Behavior Enterprises. In advance of a screening of Dr. Bailey's short film Patient like The Chipmunks, Annie interviews Dr. Bailey about his incredible career, the origins of "clicker training," the importance of learning how to train chickens, the progressiveness (or lack there of) in the world of modern dog training, and more.
Sign up for the May 22nd screening (and info on buying the Patient Like The Chipmunks DVD).
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Mentioned in this episode:
Photos, manuals and details about Animal Behavior Enterprise and IQ Zoo exhibits:
Related episodes:
A brief history of modern dog training
Reading of Page 9 of Dr. Bob Bailey's site
Reading of The Misbehavior of Organisms by Marian and Keller Breland
Reading of The ABCs of Behavior by Marian Breland
Transcript:
[intro and music]
Annie:
Hello humans. Thank you for listening. So, if you have been a regular listener over the past few months, you know that I've been digging in a bit to the history of positive reinforcement dog training over the last century or so. And I again today have one of these kind of nerdy episodes for you. If you listen to this podcast to get tips on training, I promise I will have an episode next week that will be more practical.
But today I'm excited to share with you an interview I did with Dr. Bob Bailey. Over the last few months, I have read some of his writings and some writings of his colleagues. And a couple of weeks ago, I hosted a screening of this little known short film by Dr. Bob Bailey called Patient like the Chipmunks, which was to be followed by a Q and A with the man himself, but due to some technical difficulties, the Q and A actually did not happen.
Which in the end is good news because it means we're doing a second screening of the film tomorrow, March 22nd, at 4:00 PM Eastern this time, again, to be followed by a Q and A, if everything goes well. You can sign up at schoolforthedogs.com/Bailey. If you are a certified professional dog trainer through the CCPDT, or you are a Karen Pryor academy certified training partner, you can get CE use for attending this event. Learn more at that link.
I do not believe we are going to be sharing a recording this time. So be there or miss it. It is $10 to attend. All proceeds will go to the Marian Breland Bailey fund at Henderson State University in Arkansas. If you can't make it, but still want to see the video, or if you were listening to this at a future date, you can still go to schoolforthedogs.com/bailey, and you will see there an address to which you can send a paper check for $35 to Dr. Bob Bailey himself in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and he will mail you a copy of the DVD. The details are at that link, schoolforthedogs.com/Bailey.
So in advance of tomorrow's screening, I had a conversation with Dr. Bailey, which I'm about to share with you about his career, his work with Keller and Marianne Breland, much of which is covered in much more detail in the film. Just some chronology that might be useful before listening to this recording. Although if you've seen the film already, it'll be clear, but Dr. Bailey joined Marian, then known as Marian Breland and Keller Breland working for their company Animal Behavior Enterprises.
Actually I should say he was hired by them to work for Animal Behavior Enterprises, which was a really amazing company that did a lot of things, including putting these dioramas, sort of live dioramas with live animals, in amusement parks and arcades, and in other kinds of places throughout the world. They also provided animals for the military, for lots of different commercial purposes.
But I love these dioramas because they really are kind of like Skinner boxes where the animals perform nifty feats. They even at one point created a whole amusement park of animals trained to do spectacular things. It was called IQ Zoo. In the show notes, I'll put a link to a webpage maintained by the University of Central Arkansas, where you can see photos of some of these amazing displays.
Just to clear up what can be a little bit confusing about some of the names you are going to hear, and the chronology. Marian and Keller Breland were graduate students studying under BF Skinner at the University of Minnesota in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and were really the first to take what was going on in his lab and apply it to working with animals outside of a research setting. Their business is what came to be known as Animal Behavior Enterprises.
And in the 1960s, they met up with Bob Bailey, brought him on to work at Animal Behavior Enterprises, but between the time that he was hired and that he started, Keller Breland died and Bob Bailey would actually go on to marry Marian, who then became Marian Breland Bailey. And they worked closely together until her death in 2001.
He does explain some of this in this conversation, but just wanted to clarify that. Do see the show notes for more information. And I hope to see some of you tomorrow at the screening, which will be followed by a Q and A with the man himself. Sol make sure to have your questions ready.
Annie:
Hello.
Bob Bailey:
Hi there. Says it's recording. There we are.
Annie:
You see me?
Bob:
Yeah. I see you. I see your little dog in the background, but what kind is he?
Annie:
That's Poppy. She's a nine month old Chihuahua mix. Very, very sweet. Do you have any dogs these days?
Bob:
No. I have never owned a dog before in my entire life.
Annie:
Stop it. Really?
Bob:
Absolutely.
Annie:
But you've had some pets I'm guessing?
Bob:
No, not really. My kids have had lots of pets. My mother did not like animals. She hated dogs and her reason was, is they lick their butts and then they lick your face.
Annie:
Fair enough.
Bob:Simplicity, personified. No, we, my father tried to have a hunting dog and that didn't last but a few months. And then that dad got rid of the dog.
Annie:
Huh? Well, this brings me to one of the questions I wanted to ask you, but first I just wanted to, as I'm recording this for the podcast, I wanted to ask if maybe you could introduce yourself and then we'll go from there.
Bob:
Okay. Before I do that, I should say that my house was always filled with animals. I didn't call them pets. I collected animals out in the desert and I had cages. Call them cages, some of them were pretty elaborate structures, in my bedroom when I was growing up. And mom allowed that, but they were not pets. They were kangaroo rats and wood rats and lizards and snakes and all sorts of things like that. But I would keep them for a month or two and then turn them loose.
Annie:
And were you, were you examining them observing their behavior?
Bob:
Oh yeah, I watched them, I fed them. I did things like that.
Annie:
And where did you grow up?
Bob:
In Van Nuys, California. I'm originally from Ohio.
So let's see. I'm Dr. Robert E. Bailey. And right now I reside in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and I've been here since 1965. Let's see. I attended UCLA and, well, I grew up in Van Nuys, so I went to Van Nuys high school, and then I went to UCLA and then took some graduate work in Berkeley. And then, I actually taught at University of Central Arkansas, and it's from University of Central Arkansas that I got my doctorate. And let's see what else?
Annie:
Well, I know on your bio, on your site, you refer to yourself as inventor, designer, writer, teacher, diver, photographer, and video editor.
Bob:
Yeah, I've done all of them.
Annie:
I think you've left some things out there, though. [laughs]
Bob:
Well, yeah. I've done some other things. But I guess the main thing is, and what people know me for is, some people would call it bioengineering. I don't know if I'm a behaviorist, in that I've taken some psychology classes, but my degree is not in particularly behavior, animal behavior. It's in physics, chemistry and biology.
But I guess I like to make things work. That's what I like to do. I design things, I build things. I have to also say that I was a businessman in the old days. So for some 30 years that I ran a company of, well during the summertime about a hundred people. So again, I'm a businessman. I wrote lots of checks to people, lots of payroll checks,
Annie:
Well, an animal trainer that's left off of your list here.
Bob:
Yeah. I’m an animal trainer and I made sure that even while I was running a company, I always blocked out time where I could work with, particularly with new animals. It was always an advantage on my part since I essentially owned the company, that when we got in new animals to do new things I could choose or not to be working with those. And that was an advantage on my part. So I got to work with a lot of new animals doing new things.
Annie:
So I'd like to talk in depth about Animal Behavior Enterprises, which was your business or one of your businesses. But before we go into that, tell me a little bit how you got interested in training to begin with and how you ended up hooking up with Marian and Keller. And then of course, I guess we can introduce who they were, but was it those animals in your childhood bedroom that turned you on to behavior?
Bob:
Well, the first time, and I've described this I guess a couple of years ago. And I don't even remember the name of the presentation that I was making at the time, but as a five-year-old I played with ants. And I found that I could change the behavior of ants. Now, my mother recalls my doing this, and she thought I was out there just killing ants, just a kid lying on the cement, out in front of the house drawing his finger across the concrete. Well, she thought I was killing ants.
But what I was doing, I know now, is leaving an odor trail that actually affected the ants. They could no longer detect, or they didn't want to cross my odor trail. So they went around. So I started drawing designs and I would have ants marching all over the front stoop of my house. This was in Michigan. And my mother mistook it for something else. But I vaguely remember doing it. And I found it interesting.
I then discovered science when my folks bought a set of encyclopedias, book encyclopedias, and between the ages of about five and nine, I read the entire encyclopedia. And in that I found about chemistry and physics and, you know, all sorts of…Astronomy in particular, I was always interested in astronomy. So you might say that my observational studies began at a very tender age. But I was always interested in what made things work.
Annie:
So, when you went to work professionally with animals, how did that come up?
Bob:
Well I spent a lot of time in the desert. We moved to the San Fernando valley in the early forties. And unlike now, the San Fernando valley, it was pretty empty. There weren't a lot of people in the San Fernando valley. It wasn't a lot of water and it was a lot of sand and a lot of desert out there.
And I would spend a lot of time wandering around catching animals of various kinds, and also observing them. So that started when I was about I'd say 10 nine, 10, and that continued. My father would take us hunting out near Palmdale and other places in Southern California. And I had lots of opportunity to look at animals.
So then when I went to UCLA, I got a job there and pretty soon for pay I went out and collected animals and I spent time photographing animals.
Annie:
What kind of job was it? What kind of animals were you collecting?
Bob:
Well, it was as a research assistant, a general kind of job. And I did everything from let's say evaluate the osteology collection and the theology department to spending time in the field in Mexico collecting whatever animals was being required. There's certain kangaroo rats, people were studying the vision in kangaroo rats at the time. So I would be collecting kangaroo rats.
I would also have jobs collecting parasites. I'd go to slaughter houses and collect parasites was kind of an ugly job,
Annie:
How do you collect a parasite from a slaughterhouse?
Bob:
Well with gloves, certainly.
Annie:
[laughs] Okay!
Bob:
No, it's you know, there's intestinal parasites and it's, you really don't want me to describe this one.
Annie:
[laughs] So you, it almost sounds like you started off as you say, collecting, but almost as a kind of hunter of animals. Not hunting to kill, but hunting to research.
Bob:
Well, yeah, but it was usually assigned to me. I went out and did it. Now I also collected rattlesnakes. And that was for the department of, they had a medical center of course at UCLA.
Annie:
Now at this time, were you tuned in to how animals were trained or?
Bob:
No, I was not a trainer. And my idea of a trainer was a guy with a whip, a chair, and a gun in a lion cage. That's a trainer.
Annie:
That's interesting. I think I had my own juvenile ideas of what a trainer was, different from that, but it's funny that you have your own sort of cartoon image that you remember.
Bob:
Yeah, well, we had been to see, ever heard of the name, Frank Buck? Frank Buck was absolutely amazing. Frank Buck made movies and he was an animal trainer. Clyde Beatty circus, and you know, I saw him training lions and tigers and bears. Oh my.
Annie:
Okay. And you didn't think this is what I want to do when I grow up.
Bob:
No, I didn't want to do that sort of thing. But while I was doing all of this collecting in the field, I ended up training coyotes in the field. I trained them to go to certain places, certain fields. There were fields with lots of rabbits in it. And there were three locations, alfalfa fields, where there were rabbits. And the coyotes would come out at night and they would go to one of the fields. Well, I decided I was going to have them go to the field that I wanted them to go to. But there still was not training. In my head, this was not training. I was changing behavior.
Annie:
Yeah. And creating antecedent arrangements, we might say.
Bob:
Yes indeed. Well, it was based on consequences, of course. If they went the way I wanted to, they found a dead rabbit and they didn't have to chasee rabbits. They found one.
Annie:
Ah, okay.
Bob:
So anyway. A very simple sort of thing, I used strips of cloth and dead rabbits. It was really simple. Now I did read about the Brelands at the time, and I did read about Skinner. I did some reading.
Annie:
How did that come about that you were reading about them?
Bob:
Well, because I wanted to do this changing of behavior and I started looking up, you know, how does one change behavior efficiently? So I stumbled on to Skinner, and then from Skinner, I got to the Brelands, and other people, but those two stick out my mind.
Annie:
And then you started working with dolphins, is that right?
Bob:
Well, that happened after a while. I had a military stint to do, and did that while I was at UCLA and was in a program there. And then in 1961, when I got out of — actually 1960, got out of active duty that I became a biochemist again, right back at the UCLA medical center.
Annie:
Sorry, in the military where you working with animals?
Bob:
No. No, I was in the five two five military intelligence group.
Annie:
You were working with human animals.
Bob:
Uh, yeah. You can say that.
Annie:
So back at UCLA,
Bob:
Yeah, I took a week off when I got out of the service, and then I went to the employment agency and they immediately pulled up a card that says they needed a biochemist at UCLA. So I found myself right back at UCLA where I was quite familiar.
Annie:
And is that where your professional animal training began then?
Bob:
No, I did chromatography, thin film and paper chromatography. Two dimensional, three-dimensional. I did bioassay, I did a lot of things while I was there at the department. But I got tired of that. So I moved on to something else.
But while I was at UCLA, there was a bulletin on the bulletin board from the defense department. And it advertised a biology position, the director of training for the US Navy dolphin program. Now they didn't have a program really, but they were going to have one. So they were advertising for a director of training. I had never trained a dolphin before in my life.
So, I submitted a application, but nothing happened for months and months and months and months. So I got tired of doing this sort of thing being indoors. I did not like indoor work. So I applied for California Fish and Game. Now I had already worked with California Fish and Game a lot while I was at UCLA. I knew the people there very well, so I had no problem at all getting a job there.
But after a few months I got a call from the Defense Department, from the Naval ordnance test station, Pasadena. And they wanted me to come in for an interview. This was for that Navy job, and well, okay, sure. Why not?
Annie:
Now, were you aware of what they wanted to train dolphins to do?
Annie:
Absolutely not. And they didn't either. So, so anyway, that is a totally another story, but I went in for the interview, and again, this was in Pasadena and then I ended up going out to sea with Cal Fish and Game and I was up near Alaska of all places. And I got a call saying that or asking if I could report in two weeks because I had been hired.
And of course this just blew me away. I'd never trained a dolphin before in my entire life. So how I was selected for that job, I can only speculate.
Annie:
Well, very few people had trained dolphins up until that point.
Bob:
Well, there were quite a few dolphin trainers. There was a fair number of ocean area around in 1962. As a matter of fact, there were probably more then than there are now because we had no Marine mammal protection act and you could keep a dolphin in a bathtub if you wanted to. And of course now the restrictions are quite stringent in order to keep them, the environment had to be in a certain way. So.
Annie:
The 10 ten-year-old inside me likes the idea of having a dolphin in my bathtub, but yeah
Bob:
Okay. All right. They have some pretty small dolphins.
Annie:
So you got there to train dolphins. You'd never trained dolphins. Is this where you started actually learning about —
Bob:
Yes, it was by happenstance. My good luck that Keller and Marian Breland were hired as the chief behavioral scientists for the Marine mammal program. So I got to really meet the Brelands.
Annie:
Who you had read about and read about. What had you read, because, I mean, I know even today, there's not as much information as there perhaps should be out there about them. So I'm interested in what you knew.
Bob:
Well, I knew that they trained animals. I had read newspaper articles, magazine articles I had read, of course, their papers. And you're correct. There really is not a lot out there, but you can find it if you look for it. Okay.
Annie:
And I know their work had been featured in Life magazine, had that already happened.
Bob:
Uh, yeah, that was in the fifties.
Annie:
Okay.
Bob:
So anyway I reported to point, well, actually I reported first at a Naval ordnance test station, China lake. Now, if anybody knows about China lake, there is no lake, there's no water anywhere around, it's in the middle of the Mojave desert, but that was the headquarters for the US Navy Marine mammal program.
Annie:
So you arrived there, there was no lake.
Bob:
No, it’s in the middle of the desert. I knew where it was. I'd been out there before. So actually it's right near Edwards air force base. And as a member of the Pacific rocket society, while I was at UCLA, I shot off rockets at near Edwards. So anyway I report there and then I reported to the actual duty station, which was at point Magoo, California, just north of Los Angeles. And that's where the project took place. So, and, you know, that's how we got into the dolphin program.
Annie:
So that’s when you met the Brelands. For people who are not familiar with their work, this would be a good place maybe you can talk about what they were doing at that time.
Bob:
Keller and Marian were both graduate students of Fred Skinner, B F Skinner. And Marian was his student first, and then later Keller came along. And Skinner was the person who started operant conditioning. He was the one who, I'm going to say discovered. He didn't create, so many people say that he created operant conditioning. Operant conditioning was already there. It's just a matter of, he described it in the laboratory. This was in Minnesota. This is the University of Minnesota there in Minneapolis.
And the Brelands had been students, and they got involved in this Project Pelican, which was the training of pigeons to guide bombs. And without going into all sorts of detail, it worked extremely well. By 1943, it began in ‘42, April of ‘42. By October, November of ‘42, they already had all the equipment built and they were training pigeons to guide bombs. By 1943, they were in tall towers, actually guiding bombs that were on the strings. Guided by the pecks of the pigeons, they were looking at an object to a screen. It's described on the internet, if anyone's interested.
Annie:
It seems like that was kind of the first practical application of the kind of work Skinner up to that point was doing in his lab. Would you say that's correct.
Bob:
Yeah. And I really want to emphasize that people today don't appreciate what they did in an extremely short period of time. I would say most trainers today do not really understand the technology they are trying to apply. And it's when you apply the technology, right that things move fast. They are uncomplicated because you break behavior down into little pieces.
People today just don't seem to appreciate what Skinner the Brelands and others did way back when, because they were not trying to be complicated. They were not trying to impress anybody. They were creating something, they were doing something. And they did it very quickly. If you stop and think of everything they had to do, all the equipment they had to build just develop the technology. It all took place in a period of about a year and a half to two years.
So anyway, the Brelands said, this is so good. We're going to make a business out of it. They made the next jump. So it's the Brelands who really came out of the laboratory with the technology. Now Skinner did this project with the pigeons, but it pretty well stayed in the laboratory because the military did not dress pigeons just to guide much of anything.
Annie:
Which is too bad because instead they used the bomb.
Bob:
Yeah, well, they did what they had to do to stop the war.
Annie:
Yeah. So they, they went on and started Animal Behavior Enterprises, which —
Bob:
In 1943, they began Animal Behavior Enterprises. In 1946. They brought it out and started to really do something by 1947, they were earning money doing it. And it went on from there.
Annie:
So, so interesting. So they were brought on then to work with you and the dolphins then. And so was this your kind of aha moment of, oh, this is how operant conditioning works?
Bob:
Well, yeah that they introduced me to the, let's say systematic use of operant conditioning. Now I had been using it, kind of, I mean, in a haphazard sort of way. But they taught me about precision. Now I was already used to precision and my father was a precision machinist. I was operating a lathe when I was age nine. I could, buy the age 10 to 12, I could operate virtually any machine in a machine shop. So I was used to precision. My father demanded precision. But precision in training animals, that was a whole different kettle of fish as they say.
Annie:
And I understand that Karen Pryor, when she began training dolphins, which I believe was also in the I guess the mid sixties, she also went into it knowing nothing. And got her hands on a guide written by Keller Breland.
Bob:
Yeah. Yeah. The Brelands had trained. They were the first to systematically use operant conditioning with dolphins, and they wrote a manual and that manual became all over the industry. And as I described earlier, there were a lot of dolphin facilities by 1960. There were a lot.
But when the Brelands were doing it in 1954, 55, that there were few, they were just in the throes of being built at that time. And this manual of theirs, as I said, was distributed. And it caught on like wildfire.
Annie:
Let’s first talk a little bit more about ABE. So, did you go straight to work for ABE? And also maybe you can explain a little bit of the magic that was happening there and that continued to happen there to those, to the, to the uninformed.
Bob:
Well I had a project. My objective was to get a dolphin out at sea and I had to do that first. So by 1964, I had gotten some dolphins out to sea and doing things, simple things.
Annie:
Actually, I didn't even ask what you ended up training the dolphins to do.
Bob:
Well it was essentially just go out and do something. They could detect things. There's lots of things they could do. The important thing was to get them out. Once they were out, once I had written my report, I waved bye-bye to the Navy and Keller hired me at ABE. I reported in August of 1965. Now Keller Breland died in June of 1962.
I reported in August of 1962, I'm sorry, 1962 and Keller died. He hired me in April, but I didn't report until August. I had to finish some writing and the like at point Magoo. So when I finished that, I headed out to Hot Springs Arkansas.
Now I need to point out I had been to Hot Springs a lot in the few years, between the time that I went to a point Magoo. By the time I was hired by the Navy, I traveled to Arkansas quite a few times. So I had worked with the Brelands. I had worked with the trainers there at ABE, and they opened my eyes. They were the ones who opened my eyes about the simplicity of training and how rapid it could be.
Annie:
Yeah. You remember a specific like aha moment?
Bob:
Well, my aha moment was training chickens. There's no question about it.
Annie:
Tell me more.
Bob:
Well, it was simply a matter of at point Magoo when Brelands showed up, Keller showed up he located some chickens and we trained chickens and we spent a couple of weeks training chickens.
And I found that, yes, I had been doing kind of what I should be doing, but there was a precision to it. And if you watch the behavior of the animals, you could get the behavior faster than if you just essentially dictated what you wanted to the animal. This is what I want, and you're not paying that much attention to the animal. You're not getting feedback from the animal and you're not changing your behavior.
Annie:
So working with what's being offered as a start.
Bob:
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway that was my introduction to it. Now, the advantage I had over everybody else at that time, and maybe an advantage that I've had ever since. I have spent years watching animals, in captivity and in the wild. This sharpened my eye to the behavior of the animal. So I made use it with this. So I'm not claiming any special talent or anything like that. It's just that I've got a fairly sharp eye and my reflexes are pretty good.
Annie:
Well, I actually did a chicken camp with Parvene Farhoody. Actually somewhere in here, I have a clicker that says Bailey/Farhoody on it in 2016. But you had been running chicken camp 20 years before that, right?
Bob:
Well, the Brelands started the chicken workshops in 1947, 1948. The first time they used it was with feed salesman. And this is for General Mills. And the Brelands taught them how to train, how to give animal shows, how to entertain people if you will. And they used chickens, and it was fortuitous. They did not realize that they were using the finest model that was out there. They just picked it. Now later on, they tried other things, other ways of teaching people, but they always came back to the chickens.
Annie:
Is part of it that chickens are so difficult to manhandle, or what do you think makes chicken such a good a specimen for teaching training?
Bob:
Well, have you ever tried to manhandle a lion, or a tiger, or a bear?
Annie:
[laughs] No, but it's harder to transport them to sessions.
Bob:
There's lots of reasons, you know, you have Guinea pigs and you have small mammals, various types and the like, but they have so much other behavior. They have rats, again, they have so much other behavior. A chicken's behavior is really quite limited. There's not a lot that chickens can do. What they do, they do extremely well, but what they really do well is pick up on their environment. They change their behavior rapidly, and that's what you're looking for.
Annie:
Interesting. That's probably part of the reasons why there's so many chickens in the world!
Bob:
Yeah, well, they're omnivores. They can eat anything. And they, they adapt to virtually anything and they do it quickly. That that little brain is adaptable. And so if you do something wrong, they will adapt to that wrong thing very fast. And you can see the change of behavior occurring rapidly. And if you're observant, you say, oh, that's not where I want to go. I'm going to change my behavior, but I'm afraid that most trainers don't change their behavior. They already have their idea of how they're going to train that chicken regardless of the behavior of the chicken.
Annie:
So you'd say flexibility is, is part of —
Bob:
Adaptability. Adaptability on the part of the trainer is important and it's taught in the chicken workshops.
Annie:
Well, for me, something that was a real aha moment, as I learned about animal training was realizing that adaptability, that your ability to learn and adapt to your environment relates to your ability to learn, period. You don't necessarily need to have a trainer in place, that animals are learning from their environment all the time, adapting to their environment all the time. And the better learners are the ones who are surviving and in more and more environments.
Bob:
Yeah, well, nature's created some pretty smart animals out there, but they're smart in their own environment. And what we do in the chicken workshops of course, is we create an artificial environment. And in many ways it's quite sterile. In other ways, it's quite rich. There's lots going on in a chicken workshop. All you have to do is look around you and you see all these other chickens on the table. You hear all those clicks going on. You see all these people dancing around doing all sorts of things they probably shouldn't be doing.
Annie:
I'd like to talk to you about the clicker, but first just wanted us to take a step backwards. And for people who don't know ABE was doing, could you just explain briefly some of the sort of non-Skinner box, Skinner box displays, and that kind of thing that you guys ended up doing?
Bob:
Well, first off ABE was definitely the first commercial enterprise using Skinner's technology. There's just no question about it. The Brelands were the first practitioners of Skinner's technology. I've never found anyone even close to the Brelands on doing this. And the Brelands had the idea that they could mass produce behavior. If they control the contingencies, if they controlled the environmental conditions, if they prepared the animal, if they adapted the animal to what they were going to experience out there, they could produce hundreds of animals.
Well, they did just that. And they began to automate more and more. They develop feeders. They developed the means to mass produce behavior. Now Skinner gave them the idea, and the Brelands were always, they were the first ones to say, the basic idea of doing this came from Skinner. But the actual application that came from the Brelands. Again, I know of no one for 10, 15 years that were near the Brelands in doing this.
Annie:
And so they were teaching chickens to dance and play tic-tac-toe, and so many other species as well.
Bob:
Yeah, they had chickens, rabbits, and ducks that did the automated acts. And later on, they extended it to pigs and goats and sheep and others. But those were usually hand trained and used in shows on stage where you have a handler up there because, well, they were pretty big to put in a box.
But they were famous for these automated acts that were highly reliable. They sent them all over the United States, Canada. Later on, we sent them all over the world. Tic-tac-toe, that was my development that came out in 1973, ‘74. We had tic-tac-toe units all around the United States, Canada, Africa, gee, Australia, Europe, all over. They were just universal.
Annie:
Yeah, I think I mentioned to you, I grew up with one that I was amazed by, and I think it never, never occurred to me that this was something that I would become so interested in later on.
Bob:
Where was that? I'm curious.
Annie:
It was an arcade in Chinatown, in Manhattan.
Bob:
Ah, Chinatown Fair! Mott street amusement.
Annie:
Which I think is the one that Calvin Trillin then wrote about.
Bob:
Yes indeed. Yeah, we met Calvin a couple of times. He came out to visit us a couple of times.
Annie:
My mom wants to know how, she asked me to ask you how the chicken always won. What was the secret? Or can you not say?
Bob:
The secret, the secret, put that in quotes, is the perfect game of tic-tac-toe is always a tie. That's the secret. It's always a tie. It's nothing else other than a tie. So if you lose to birdbrain, you made a mistake.
Annie:
So the chicken was just pushing a button that will then signal the next extra O coming up. It wasn't the chicken was making a decision about which extra O to push, is that right?
Bob:
We did give the chicken a little help. It is a chicken yet after all.
Annie:
[laughs] Well, in my five day workshop though, I was pretty impressed. I mean, obviously I'd come into it having done some training, but I think someone who hadn't done any training still would have been able to in five days, do what I did, which was you know, I taught a chicken to differentiate a yellow dot from a red and a blue dot, I think it was, and shapes.
Bob:
But, but afterwards, what did you do? After you taught the discrimination? What did you do?
Annie:
Well, I think what you're getting at, which was so interesting, was one of the last exercises, and it's a five-week program. I only did the first week. I would have gladly done the five weeks if it was offered again. But, was switch, right?
Bob:
It’s called a stimulus reversal.That was the class. All that stuff that you did before was in preparation for that, the stimulus reversal.
Annie:
Suddenly saying, okay, you've been touching the yellow dot all week. Now we're going to do the blue dot. It was mind blowing. And I learned so much about about extinction and about the importance of timing, because you know, that moment that the chickens pecking is very, very quick.
Bob:
You learned about yourself, is what you did.
Annie:
I did. And I learned, I fricking love training chickens, so I wish the programs were being offered more.
I’d like to ask you a little bit about the clicker. So I know that, or I believe that they were the first, that Keller and Marian were the first to use a clicker.
Bob:
Well, yeah, they were the first to use the clicker. They had the hand make them because you couldn't buy a clicker then, all of the clickers that were being commercially produced were being produced for the military.
Annie:
Right. And then the military, they use them to indicate where to shoot. Is that right? Well,
Bob:
It was a signaling device. It was recognition. It's in the dark and you click it once and somebody else is supposed to click it twice and things like that. Okay. So the point was, is they were the ones, the Brelands were the one to bring to the fore the conditioned reinforcement. It's not that Skinner didn't know about the conditioned reinforcer, and he didn't use it, but it was the Brelands who said, this is a major tool for getting animals to do things quickly and especially at some distance.
And so they were the ones who really developed to a high level of performance, a conditioned reinforcer. And they have a name for it. The bridging stimulus, which us dolphin trainers changed to bridge. And I know that Keller did not like that very much because it was not precise, but that's what we did is we call it a bridge.
Annie:
One other question I wanted to ask you and, you know, thank you so much for your time, but in the film, which we're going to be doing another screening of in a couple of weeks, as you know, you mentioned several times that, and I'm paraphrasing, but something like society wasn't ready for this kind of training, in the talk about how Marian and Keller, and later you, tried to bring this to the world of dogs, for example. And it didn't really catch on. I'm curious if you think the world is ready now, and if not, maybe why?
Bob:
Well, the problem is that the practitioners today complicate the issue. In the old days, the reason that it wasn't accepted at first is that the Brelands were threatening essentially the working lives of people who were out there who were using coercion as their primary means of training dogs.
They were trying to introduce the idea of using reinforcement. A given reinforcer, whether it's food or social reinforcement or whatever. They were trying to introduce this idea, which is totally contrary to the idea at the time, which is the animal was supposed to do what you wanted. And if not, you provided a punishment to this animal. That was accepted. That was the way to do things with the vast majority of trainers out there. I won't say a hundred percent, but the vast majority. And they were in a position of power.
There was no mass media at the time. Television was just coming in. And the only people involved in spreading ideas about animal training were the dog food companies. Quaker Oats, Purina companies like that, and they all had advisory committees. And when the Brelands tried to put their ideas before these advisory groups, of course, this was all of the trainersvlife's blood, what they had been doing. They did not know about reinforcement. They knew about coercion, and that's what they used. And they killed the Brelands’ ideas. They did not allow them to be spread.
Annie:
Which is pretty amazing to me because I would think, you know, you had these animal shows happening in a way that they're not happening now. I mean, I guess we have YouTube now, but we don't have tic-tac-toe playing chickens the way we used to. And, you know, your IQ zoo, which is talked about in the film, et cetera, et cetera. You would think that this would have led people to say, how are these animals being trained?
Bob:
It scared the professionals.
Annie:
Okay. Do you think that's changing?
Bob:
Yeah. I think it's changing, but why in the hell is it taking so long? Why?
Annie:
That’s what I want to know!
Bob:
Whyh. Well, because if you want to get a dog's attention in the course of a chain of behaviors, what can you best do? You can startle the animal. You can scare the animal to stop the behavior. If you deliver a piece of food that takes a little while. The point is that everyone, I think virtually everyone knows that if you want to quickly get a dog's attention, do something that the dog doesn't like, and that will get the dog's attention right away.
Okay. Well, that is an easy way to base your training, because you get supposed instant results. What you don't want to have happen is all of the other things that happened when you startle —
Annie:
The fallout.
Bob:
Essentially the fallout. And that's what the trainers were not addressing at the time. Now, remember, this is the life's blood of those people. They earned their livings that way. And operant conditioning, the use of reinforcement in operant conditioning was a threat to their training. You were telling everyone that what they were doing was not the best way to do it.
Annie:
And today though, there still are a lot of trainers. I mean, certainly on TV and on the internet. I feel like if you don't know what to look for as a dog owner looking for training, you're very likely to end up with someone who's going to put a shock collar on your dog, or tell you that you need to train your dog with your powerful energy.
Bob:
Sure. All you have to do is look at the yellow pages. What's left of the yellow pages, in dog training, and just look at the ads and you'll see that there is still a lot of “command” training going on.
Annie:
When you first saw Cesar Millan, for example, which I'm guessing you've seen were you, did you think, oh, I thought we'd come past this?
Bob:
No. But you know, Cesar Millan is just a phenomenon, like so many others in the past. Now, if you look at Cesar Millan, look at his first season and look at his last season. And you will see a dramatic difference in Caesar Millan's behavior. You will see that he has changed his behavior.
Now I can't go into the story. There's just really not enough time, but in I think it's the most recent book. Now you will find me mentioned, because I got involved in that. I don't know if you've read his, but Caesar Rules or something.
Annie:
I know the book you're talking about. Yes. And I will go back and take a look at that. So, can we sum it up saying that you're hopeful that maybe now is the time, or are you still feeling like the world isn't ready, as you say in the film?
Bob:
The world of training is in the hands of your generation, not mine. I'm out of it. I'm here. I am a let's say voice of the past. I voiced a little disappointment that is not a lot further on because the technology. And we haven't talked about the CIA cats or the CIA ravens or anything like that. What they did 50 years ago is something that people should look at and say, why can't we do at least this good today, if not better?
Because I have not had the technology from anyone. I have tried to open what I know to as many people as possible, and yet people keep trying to change it. They keep trying to make it more complicated. They keep trying to make it more complicated. Training is simple, but not easy. It is honestly simple. Those of you out there who are teaching it, teach it simply. Teach it as simple steps, not complicated steps. That's my word to the world.
Annie:
All right. One final question. I promise. And then I'll let you go. I know you need to go. Do you have an all time great success, an animal that you trained that you never thought could be trained, or something that you just are extremely proud of that you could share?
Bob:
Well goodness. What am I most proud of? Well, let's see. I could say I was the first one to work with dolphins at sea. But I guess my greatest accomplishments, I guess having three sets of twins and marrying Marian Breland, I guess.
Annie:
Well, I was referring to it an animal training accomplishment, but I'll take that, and maybe I'll push you further when we do our Q and A in a couple of weeks, on that topic. I thought you'd maybe talk about a raccoon playing baseball, but [laughs]
Bob:
They're all simple. They're all so simple.
Annie:
Interesting.
Bob:
None of it was that complicated.
Annie:
Impressive, but simple and not complicated. Well, thank you so much for your time, Dr. Bob, really appreciate it. And I will see you in a couple of weeks at our next screening, which with fingers crossed I say will include a Q and A. So thank you so much. And I'll be in touch between now and then.
Bob:
Okay. Bye.
Annie:
Bye.
[outro and music]
