13 MayEpisode 205 | Happy Birthday Karen Pryor! Dr. Julie Vargas, daughter of B.F. Skinner, on the importance of this nonagenarian’s work in the field of positive reinforcement-based animal training
Karen Pryor turns ninety on May 14th! Annie is celebrating today and... plotting continued celebrations on this podcast in the coming year.
If you're a Karen Pryor fan, join the celebration! If you're not, you'll enjoy learning why she is so worthy of it. In this episode, Annie interviews BF Skinner Foundation president Dr. Julie Vargas, about the importance of this incredible scientist, writer and entrepreneur who, over the last thirty years, has done more than probably anyone else alive to help show people how we can use operant conditioning and secondary reinforcers to train dogs with rewards: aka, clicker training.
When her husband bought Sea Life Park in the 1960s, Pryor was tasked with training the dolphins to perform. She got her hands on a paper written by students who were working in BF Skinner's Harvard lab, and it outlined the basics of operant conditioning and how to use a secondary reinforcer, like a whistle, to pinpoint the moment a desired behavior occurred. It further described how to then use successive approximations to shape the behavior using reinforcement. She took what she had learned about dolphins and wrote a book about about using positive reinforcement in everyday life: Don't Shoot The Dog!, then started doing seminars on how to use a clicker with dogs in the 1990s. In the 2000s, she started running Clicker Expo, a conference which brings the worlds best positive-reinforcement trainers together several times a year, and began training dog trainers through her Karen Pryor Academy.
Follow us on Instagram, @schoolforthedogs, where we are giving away her book Reaching The Animal Mind and a signed clicker this weekend.
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Mentioned in this episode:
Learn more about the BF Skinner Foundation
ClickerExpo | Karen Pryor Clicker Training | Animal Training Conference
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Transcript:
Annie:
Tomorrow May 14th marks the birthday of Karen Pryor. And this is not any birthday she's having tomorrow. She's turning 90. She has done so much with those years, so much that has benefited the lives of so many dogs and so many people through her work. Her work as a scientist, as a writer, as an animal trainer, an educator, and an entrepreneur.
She started the Karen Pryor Academy, which I attended in 2010, really going in knowing nothing about the world of positive reinforcement dog training. I just thought being a dog trainer sounded like a great career, sign me up. There is no way I had any idea what a life changing experience it would be doing that six month program, because it really shifted the way that I see the world and the way that we treat so many behavior problems in our homes, in our society, in ways that don't make a lot of sense, at least when seen through the prism of what we know about behavioral science and how it's such a privilege that we can experiment with this technology using a clicker, which is so powerful and so simple with these wonderful animals who are basically our captives. And gosh, it feels good to give our little captives the best possible life we can.
Anyway, Karen Pryor is, of course, the person who started the Karen Pryor Academy and Clicker Expo. She got her start working with dolphins, using a pamphlet that was written about how to train animals, written by students of BF Skinner's graduate students. She had never trained dolphins before in her life, but she figured it out and saw the power of a conditioned or secondary reinforcer with the dolphins. It was usually a whistle. She made it her mission to share with dog owners how this same technology could be used with their pups.
The seminars that she held to show people how to use secondary reinforcers, in this case a clicker, to train a dog started in the early 1990s and inspired the first generation of clicker trainers. Those seminars then became Clicker Expo, which started in the early 2000s and holds fabulous conferences for animal trainers looking to improve their skills throughout the world.
And I have been to several Clicker Expos. The first one I went to was in 2011, and I had the chance while I was there to meet Karen Pryor. I explained to her that I was a journalist, that I was transitioning from a career as a print journalist and had just graduated. Karen Pryor Academy was possibly looking to write about Clicker Expo and she was kind enough to talk to me. We videoed the whole conversation. I was excited to have this footage, to transcribe it, to write about it. I uploaded the whole thing to my computer.
And 10 days later, I spilled seltzer on my computer. The computer stopped working, but a friend of mine said that he thought the hard drive was maybe okay. So he took the hard drive out of the computer and put it in some sort of like external hard drive. And I was sort of scared to even look, to see if it successfully had gotten onto this hard drive, but it was like on my to-do list.
People, this was in 2011. I have carried around this hard drive now for over a decade. There was a massive fire in my apartment in 2013. And when I had the chance to go back into my incredibly charred home after running out with nothing but my cat and my dog and my keys and my wallet I was like, where's the hard drive, must find hard drive. And I did!
Now at this point in the story, I should tell you something that I learned about fire damage is that it can damage devices that weren't on because of the smoke. So I wasn't sure that the hard drive would even still work. Anyway, I'm telling you this whole story just to make the point that this interview was important to me, because it was a chance for me to get to sit down with someone who has been a real hero, and I think is something of a living legend. And I haven't had it in me all these years to figure out if the thing was salvaged, because if it wasn't, it's too big of like a kick in the stomach.
So because it's her birthday, I thought I really need to figure out if I have this. And wouldn't that be a great podcast episode to share this now old recording of my interview with Karen Pryor, but that's gonna mean having to face whether or not this thing still exists.
Last week, I finally decided I was going to do it. I unearthed this thing from the bottom of a box of dead or possibly dead technology that lives behind my sofa. I somehow managed to find a plug that turned this literally charred hard drive on. And I found a plug that seemed to fit it and to have an end that could plug into my computer, and my computer could not see the hard drive. So this is not the worst possible end to the story because it's possible that I just need to find a different plug that is perhaps a more right plug. I am going to walk this thing over to a Best Buy and hope that a nice person in a blue shirt will solve my problems.
So that was my first idea of a birthday episode. Then I thought, well, maybe I could just ask a whole bunch of people who I know have been impacted in a great way by her life and work. Just ask them to say Happy Birthday and something that they would like to thank her for. And that seemed like a really great idea, but time is not infinite. And I honestly just wasn't sure if I could pull that off.
So then I thought, well, if I could just talk to one person in the world about Karen Pryor, who would I like to speak to? And the obvious answer was BF Skinner, since so much of the work that she's done is showing people how we can use what he was doing in the lab with dogs in such an awesome way. But BF Skinner is unfortunately dead.
His daughters, however, are very much alive. I spoke to his younger daughter, Deborah, a few years ago for the podcast. But for this episode, I felt that the more appropriate person to speak to would be to his older daughter, Dr. Julie Vargas. She is the president of the BF Skinner foundation in Cambridge, which publishes the quarterly magazine Operants. She is a former president of the Association for Behavior Analysis International. And she is the author of Behavior Analysis for Effective Teaching. She is a long time friend of Karen Pryor’s. And also, I would say, pretty uniquely positioned to talk about her influence in the world of good dog training. So I'm really happy to get to share this little conversation I had with her.
Now I haven't totally abandoned my initial idea, which was to talk to lots of people about how their lives and their work have been influenced by Karen Pryor. In some ways I've already done this. The last two dog trainers I interviewed for the podcast were graduates of KPA, but in this new season of the podcast, which is being kicked off by this episode, I'm planning to lean into that. I'm looking forward to talking to people about her and sharing some of her work with you in the period of her career after she was working with dolphins.
But before she was teaching people about clicker training, she wrote a book called Don't Shoot the Dog, which I think is one of the books that has influenced me more than any other. It's actually not a book about dog training at all, but there's so much in there that I am excited to talk about and share with you in future episodes. So I've decided that this is going to be the Karen Pryor, See You Soon School For The Dogs Podcast. I'm thrilled to get to kick it off with Dr. Julie Vargas.
[music]
Julie Vargas:
I'm Julie Vargas. I'm the older daughter of BF Skinner, who is the foremost behavioralist and behavioral scientist, really, of the 20th century. I spent most of my life in the field of teaching. I wanted to be a teacher ever since I was in seventh grade. And so I went on. And I majored in music. So I went into graduate school in music, but it was the idea I would teach it, not that I was going to play because I was never very enthusiastic about doing practicing, which is something you really have to do if you wanna be professional.
But then I met my husband in 1960, and we were married in 1961. And that ended the idea that I was going to be teaching at Spence School where I was working as a third grade teacher. We went to the University of Pittsburgh. I got my degree there in educational research. I gave up on teaching music and went just to using behavioral principles for improving education in general.
Annie:
As far as animal training goes, I know from having interviewed your sister a few years ago that your father was, as one one may not be surprised to hear or may be surprised to hear, a very gifted animal trainer. That makes me wonder particularly about your view of Karen Pryor and how she, I guess, took your father's work to a new generation. How did you first meet Karen Pryor or become aware of her?
Julie:
I'm not sure. I do want to say one thing though, that the thing that was so critical about what my father did, was to realize that it's immediate reinforcement that's critical. Reward is not the same thing. You can reward a dog later, but what is it strengthening? Well, it may be strengthening what the dog was doing later, if it is in fact something that is a reinforcer and strengthens.
Karen took that whole system into dog training. And she had Expos. She called it Expo, Clicker Expo. The thing that made it possible was what was called a conditioned reinforcer. And that is something that gives an immediate stimulus, technically, immediate sound or flash in some cases of light or anything immediate that bridges the time between the reinforc–the action itself and the ultimate reinforcement which in most cases with dogs or in many cases in dogs is food. It also can be scratches behind the ear. It can be all kinds of other things, too. But it started out being food, mostly.
Annie:
So for people listening, who don't know Karen Pryor's origin story, from what I understand she started out – well, she started out as something of a breastfeeding expert. I actually picked up one of her early books on breastfeeding years ago when, when I was getting ready to do that. And her husband purchased a sea life park, and nobody around had trained any kind of animal, except Karen had had some experience with horses. And she was given the job of teaching these dolphins to do something interesting for guests and –
Julie:
And she had no idea of how to do it, but she ran into some people who had some behavioral training. And the nice thing about starting out with dolphins is that you can't use punishment, or at least it's very difficult to use punishment. You have to look at something that can be used to reinforce the behavior you want. That started her off on that.
Annie:
That started her off, and I believe she was working with a guide that was written by one of your father's graduate students. I think Karen is really the one who's credited with taking that technology and bringing it to the world of dog training.
Julie:
No question. I agree. There's no question about that. She started setting up standards. There were a lot of people that wanted to train dogs. But, you know, if you don't know the principles, well, at least the use of clicker training, you are not going to have the kind of success you want. You may end up with a scared dog or a nervous dog or something like that. Using those small steps so that you are 90% sure that the dog is going to do what you're asking it to do. And then you maybe ask something just a tiny bit more difficult.
Well, you know, of course the steps, and I'm sure that the people listening also know that the, what we call shaping is taking a tiny step at a time when you're sure that it's within the ability of the dog, you don't ask for something that you haven't ever seen the dog do. And Karen was terrific at that. She had these Clicker Expos. I went to two of them, I think only two, one in San Diego and one in Connecticut. And they were wonderful. She had sessions. She would get up on a stage with a dog.
Annie:
And this was as early as the ‘90s, right? The early nineties?
Julie:
Yeah. She would get on stage with a dog she'd never seen before. From one of the people that were in the audience. And everybody at these Clicker Expos, you brought your dog. She had to find hotels that would house all of these different dogs and, you know, arrange for places for the dogs to, you know, to eliminate and all that kind of stuff. She really had a lot of work to get these going.
And so she would get on the stage, and somebody would say something for her to shape. She'd do it right there, no hesitation. I remember myself teaching things as a demonstration, you know, just friends or something. And, I always thought, I hope it works, which is so silly because it always works but she had absolutely no fear, you know, whatever the dog was.
Annie:
Your father was doing this work in the thirties, the forties, the fifties in his lab. This is the nineties then that you're talking about where Karen Pryor started to get started with Clicker Expo. Although I think Clicker Expo is still going on. Here we are now in the 2020s, and there is a lot of disagreement out there about whether or not behavior – technology is rooted in behavioral science, let's call it. Work on dogs should be used on dogs, whether reward should be used on dogs, whether dog behavior is about anything more than the person's inadequacies, the owner's inadequacies. This world, I think, is probably louder because of social media than it was 30, 40 years ago.
But I'm wondering if your father, if you know if he had any feelings about the weird world of dog training. You know, here he was doing experiments in the lab, when people had animals they could be experimenting within their homes, and the experiments that they were doing were not rooted in these principles.
Julie:
He always believed that the true test of any science was the practical applications that could be derived from it. And he would see and did see, actually, the work that Karen Pryor was doing as a verification of the principles that he had researched.
There is one interesting thing that not everybody knows, and that is that he started out working with animals with apparatus. And then during the war years, which is in the forties –
Annie:
What do you mean by apparatus?
Julie:
Equipment that delivered the food. It was operated automatically. So, you know, every three presses of a letter, or pecks on a key would get food.
Annie:
Mm-hmm.
Julie:
Well, he really didn't have a good idea about shaping until one time he was doing some work for the government to try to teach pigeons to guide missiles. And the government was being lax about getting back. So they had nothing to do, and he took a ping pong ball or a golf ball or something that size and said, well, let's see if we can teach the bird to knock it around. But there was no equipment set up to teach a bird to knock it around. So he said, well, let's wire it, so we can do it with a hand. And that's the first time that he actually shaped behavior by hand.
And that started the whole, the whole application with animals. That's where Breland-Bailey started their work. It was after they were graduate students working on that project.
Annie:
Right. The project –
Julie:
I saw this, and they thought, wow.
Annie:
Wow. So he was recruited to work on creating guided missiles, pigeon-guided missiles by General Mills before he had realized how to shape behavior?
Julie:
Yes. He was shaping it by –
Annie:
By dumb luck of the fixed rate –
Julie:
By changing apparatus, changing the equipment a little bit and then changing it a little bit more. And just, he really didn't know about clicker training until at that time. And then, as I said, the Brelands went running off with it.
Annie:
That's so interesting. It's also interesting because of course, secondary reinforcers are incredibly important in human life for much of the same reasons, right? Like, you don't give your employee the groceries and the gas for their car. You give them a dollar. It's much faster, more convenient. Like, I deposit money directly into the accounts of my employees. And look at what a powerful thing that has proven to be with animals. And, yeah. So do you think he was aware of Karen Pryor's work?
Julie:
Oh, yes, of course he was. He, she came and visited him at Harvard. They had such a great talk that he asked her whether she had a job for my younger sister.
Annie:
Oh, right, right! I remember now.
Julie:
And she went to see Live Park and spent the whole summer training dolphins, and he went and visited, and Karen put on a special show where my sister Deborah did the shaping and the show. So of course he knew Karen.
Annie:
Okay. Well, I don't know if she will be listening to this. But, if she is listening, would you like to wish her a happy birthday directly yourself?
Julie:
I certainly would. I wish her the very happiest birthday.
Annie:
All right.
Julie:
You know, for years we had tea together every few weeks, and just when she moved farther away, we just stopped. And I'm sorry about that. I think maybe we should have Zoom tea or something. In any case, she came over one year when our Concord grapes were producing incredible numbers of grapes. And we spent a whole afternoon picking Concord grapes and she made grape jelly and we were eating as many as we picked, I think. And so I know that she, she's a fan of picking Concord grapes
Annie:
In my head. I'm gonna picture you both like Ethel and Lucy. And I love Lucy stomping through the Concord grapes barefoot. [laughs]
Julie:
It would be fine.
Annie:
You can't tell me that's not what happened.
[music]
Annie:
Professor Vargas is the president of the BF Skinner Foundation, which publishes a wonderful digital quarterly magazine that you can sign up for for free at BFSkinner.org. And if you're on Instagram, make sure to go over to @SchoolForTheDogs where this weekend, we are doing a giveaway where one lucky follower will be getting Karen Pryor's book, Reaching the Animal Mind, and a clicker with her signature on it, put out by the Karen Pryor Academy. And you can follow me on Instagram @Annie.Grossman. Thanks a lot for listening.
