ken ramirez animal trainer by annie grossman

22 MayEpisode 61 | The Greatest Animal Trainer On Earth: Ken Ramirez

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When Ken Ramirez is not training elephants to avoid poachers, teaching dogs to count, coaxing polar bears out of suburban garbage cans or getting butterflies to fly on cue, he is mentoring and educating dog trainers. Ken is the Executive Vice President and public face of Karen Pryor Clicker Training, which operates the Karen Pryor Academy, among other things. In this episode, he and Annie discussed his new book of essays, how he almost got The Dog Whisperer's time slot, the existence of free will, sleep training a baby and more.

Transcript:

Annie:

Hi, my name is Annie Grossman and I'm a dog trainer. This podcast is brought to you by School for the Dogs, a Manhattan based facility I own and operate along with some of the city's finest dog trainers. During this podcast, we'll be answering your questions, geeking out on animal behavior, discussing pet trends, and interviewing industry experts. Welcome to School for the Dogs podcast.

**music**

Annie:
So if you are a professional animal trainer or aspiring to be a professional animal trainer, I'm guessing that you've probably heard of my guest today. If you're not, you probably haven't. Whether you're in one of those categories or the other, I am really excited to get to share this conversation with you with this pretty remarkable man.

Now, I normally like to ask people how they first got into the field of animal training or dog training in particular, but I didn't go into that with my guests today only because there were so many things I wanted to talk to him about, and you can also get his backstory on a couple other great podcasts, including the Animal Training Academy Podcast with Ryan Cartlidge and Hannah Brannigans podcast, Drinking from the Toilet. The short version is he grew up on a ranch, began volunteering, working with a guide dog organization when he was still a teenager, and then kind of lucked into a job working with exotic animals, which then helped mold his choices of what to study in college. He then spent more than two decades working at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, where he eventually was the Executive Vice President of Animal Care. And well, I'm just gonna let him introduce himself and talk about what he's doing now.

**music**

Ken Ramirez:
My name is Ken Ramirez and I am the executive vice president and chief trading officer for Karen Pryor Clicker Training. And I have been training, gosh, for over 40 years now. Worked in the zoological field. I work as a consultant for zoos and aquariums. I work as a consultant for search and rescue dogs and law enforcement and guide dogs. And I do a lot of work in the conservation arena, so I have a lot of interests and I keep very busy.

Annie:
And in the field of dog trainers, at least I'm sure in larger fields than even the dog training community, you are people's idol. You are an idol and a mentor to me. I'm really grateful that you're taking the time to talk to me and with the School for the Dogs podcast listeners. You know, it's funny, I'm sure every industry is like this, but there are people who become celebrities to you that are more important than the celebrities that you see on film. And you are certainly a person like that. Actually, I said to my husband, I'm going to interview Ken Ramirez. And he said, Oh really? And I said, but you only know who that is because you're married to a dog trainer, right? He's not like someone that everybody knows? And he was like, No, that's, that's true. Do feel like a celebrity, Ken?

Ken:
Oh, I appreciate that. I don't, I don't feel like a celebrity, but it's very nice of you to think of me as one. But, uh, just another dog trainer, like you are.

Annie:
No, no, no. You're being humble. And you're also, I have to say just one of the kindest people that anyone can ever come across. Every time we've met, I just think, I aspire to be such a good kind person, someone who is so capable of walking the walk, using positive reinforcement with everything, everything you do, every person you meet.

Ken:
Well, thank you. I think we all struggle with it from time to time. Especially when it comes to working with people. I think we grow up in an environment where our teachers, our parents, our coaches, et cetera, have ruled either with an iron fist or by saying no all the time. And so even though as trainers, we learn how to use positive reinforcement, we've never really been shown how to use it with people effectively. And that requires verbal communication skills that are different from the way we communicate with dogs. And so it confounds us. It makes it difficult for us sometimes to figure out how to apply it to an everyday interaction with a friend, with a colleague, with a spouse, with an employee, et cetera.

Annie:
So Ken, your new book The Eye of the Trainer: Animal Training, Transformation, and Trust — tell me how this book came to be.

Ken:
I write a monthly letter or an article that appears on the Karen Pryor Clicker Training website, and it's available to anybody who goes to the website. It's not directed just to our Karen Pryor Academy graduates. You don't have to buy anything to get the newsletter. It's just a matter of signing into the website and seeing what I have to say this month.

Annie:
It's an excellent read. I do want to talk more about that in a second. And also didn't Karen Pryor have a similar book that she put out of her letters?

Ken:
She did. She did. It was one of the letters…I have to turn behind me and look at my bookcase to remember the name of hers–On My Mind, that's what it was called. And that was her reflections on being a tainer and she'd written over the years. And so, my book is similar in that I, over the five years that I've been in my role with Karen Pryor, it's like a training–I write an article every month and we took some of the best of those and put them in the book. And I ended up writing, I think, eight or nine new articles that are just in the book, to sort of fill some gaps in places where I felt people might have questions or want more information.

Annie:
So before we get into some stories from the book, I want to go back to the fact that you are such an amazing trainer of people. You're such a great leader, and you've come up with so many practical solutions rooted in behavioral science and rooted in the laws of learning to help so many species of animals. But why is it that this kind of training isn't used more with human animals? I know you see a little bit of it in people who work like in Special Ed, a little bit of it in workplace management and that realm, but I don't know. I just see what kind of things you've been able to accomplish in training animals, from pet dogs to animals in the wild, and you do it with such grace and ease and you make it all so understandable. And yes, you're manipulating animal behavior, but the animals all love you. So why can't Ken Ramirez be president? Why aren't the smart training techniques that you use so beautifully, why are human animals benefiting?

Ken:
I think it's an interesting question. And you pose a really great question. You know, why is it that the whole world hasn't been attracted to this science and doesn't use the science on an everyday basis. But I think actually we do see it used a lot, but not everybody recognizes that it is the science of behavior. It's interesting because when we start talking about the science of behavior and talk about it from the standpoint of using the various tools that we have as trainers, we find that a lot of people even trainers fail to recognize it as a hard natural science. And Susan Friedman. I love listening to her talk because she often talks about the fact that when, when I'm holding a pen in my hand, and if I let go of it, it falls to the floor. None of us are surprised that the laws of gravity were in effect. Yet when we managed to shape behavior and help a dog go to its mat or teach a child how to do a task, we don't marvel–we don't think about the science that's involved. And we Marvel at like, that's a particularly smart dog, or that child is a particularly bright individual. And very little credit is given to the teacher or to the fact that the dog learned what it did or the child learned what it did based on the laws of learning.

What's interesting is when you, if you study business or if you study academics and you look at the instructors that really excel or the businesses that really excel, you do begin to see that they are applying the laws of that science accurately. They just don't necessarily call your attention to that science. I think in one of the articles in the book, actually several articles in the book. I talk about a business book that I was asked to read when I was at another company. And my president gave us all this book to read about how to make a company go from good to great. And as I looked through that book, I later went back and wrote an article about the fact that they were applying all of these positive reinforcement principles. They just didn't refer to them as scientific principles. They just talked about business skills and how you apply them.

I even did an article about the game Pokemon Go, in which I talk about the fact that it's a very addicting game. And when you look at the way the developers of the game developed it, they put all of these wonderful reinforcers in there that helped motivate people to continue playing the game. And so I think as we look around our world, we see that successful businesses, successful teachers, successful parents, successful trainers use those skills.

But I think it's because we have not been indoctrinated with the concept that these are all scientific laws. They are behavioral laws that always work, but somehow that fact escapes us. And we–and I think part of the reason for this, and I don't want to get into a big discussion about free will or the lack of free will or whatever it is that makes us feel–

Annie:
Why not?

Ken:
Well, because I think what it does is I think it's that discussion that pushes people away from the concept of training, because there's this belief as humans, that somehow when we use behavioral science, that that is somehow manipulation. But realistically, and again, I'm going to quote Susan Friedman. She's one of the best at talking about this. When you and I both right now are wearing glasses, none of us think to ourselves, “Oh, that optometrist trick doesn't use science to make us see better!” Instead we go, “Of course he used science to help us see better.” And we're very grateful for it. But somehow when it comes to our behavior, we want to resist the fact that there is scientific laws that work on that, because we want to believe that we are free spirits, that we can do what we want and nobody's affecting us. But the reality is the laws of behavior and learning affect us every day.

Annie:
Right, so I think I agree with you that we are being trained all the time by people, companies, governments, whatever that in many cases are using positive reinforcement. I like marketing. Like I'm interested in marketing as a subject because I think it's about training people.

Ken:
It is.

Annie:
It's a form of people training and that, if you're doing it well, it should be enjoyed by the trainee. But if you take the broader view, negative reinforcement seems like the major motivator of government, or, you know, nobody is saying, if you drive the speed limit, you're going to be able to, you know, win some money. Nobody's saying like, why don't you pay taxes? You know, voluntarily everything. It seems to me like “do this or else.” And I don't understand why we live in a world like that. If we have the ability to create environments for animals in the wild or domestic animals that are our mini worlds of creating environments, where the animals can succeed and using smart rewards given with good timing to positively reinforce behaviors. If we have the ability to do that to, to a great extent with animals we work with, why isn't it that the powers that be are using more of that with us?

Ken:
I think it's cultural and it's historical. I think there's no question. I know many, many, many, many people who use positive reinforcement in their everyday lives with their children, with their businesses. And they're very, very successful, but in the big scheme of things, we have grown up in an environment where punishers and aversive tools were used. And the reality is that punishers and aversive tools are sometimes easy. They're very quick to use. And as soon as you use one, it actually reinforces the user. And I think it's one of those weird examples of positive reinforcement, of reinforcement at work. You know, if you punish a child, if you punish an employee, if you punish a dog and you get results, you are reinforced. And so you are likely and driven to do it again. And because in a society we've never yet set up a big societal mechanism where we think about things in that reinforcement fashion.

And so when we grow up in a world, so surrounded by a verse of tools, I think we naturally gravitate in that direction because we've seen it work. Because we're not always thinking, how can I do this in a positive way? Why should I do this in a positive way? And so it's, I have seen so many people employ good positive reinforcement in it, and I've seen it permeate a company, seeing it permeate the way a parent raises their children. And in those small little bubbles, it's very, very successful, but we are constantly being influenced by the rest of the world. And so, unless we live in that unique bubble, we get out of the real world, we feel compelled to do something because we have to avoid a fine, or we have to avoid this problem. And it becomes a part of our everyday being. And so we have to individually fight against it, just to use positive reinforcement sometimes in effective ways in the real world. And that's why it's a challenge. And I think it's, it's a cultural, historical thing that's around us. That constantly impacts how we apply behavioral knowledge.

Annie:
Do you, do you look at the world though in that way of like, gosh, there are problems that with a good dog trainer could be fixed

Ken:
All the time. I mean, I first looked at it from a standpoint of my own life. In other words, I looked at it when I run an organization. When I deal with people, how can I help make the people around me more pleasant, more productive, et cetera. And I try to utilize those techniques. And certainly I believe one of the things that makes me enjoy, for example, watching trashy reality TV is because while I can't affect the world, sometimes when you watch one of those shows and you watch a show, like, I don't know, “Survivor,” for example, and you're watching the decisions they make, I think to myself, gosh, if he would have just said this or done this, he could have gotten it without coercion or without force. But it allows me, I think about these kinds of things all the time.

And for me watching reality TV allows me to apply those things in a way that doesn't depress me. While if I look at what's going on in the world and I look at some government issue, or I just look at the way we handle the pandemic right now. And the fact that we're many of us are sheltering in place, but there are those protestors who are out there who don't want to shelter in place. If I think about how we could use positive reinforcement and behavioral technology in those situations, but I am not in a position to affect that change, that just sets myself up for frustration, and then I'm not using good reinforcement on myself. And so I try not to dwell on those things unless I happen to be getting into an intellectual discussion about it with someone like you.

Annie:
Maybe if the government could just hire you. Okay, well then this, this brings me to my next question, which is about–Well, so I'm obsessed with, I've only seen like the three minutes that exist online, but I'm obsessed with your Australia/New Zealand TV show that was on in the early 2000s called “Talk to the Animals.” And, I have rarely heard you talk about it and it seems like the most fascinating idea for a show. Can, can you describe a little bit about it and also tell me where I can see it and why I can't see more of it easily so far.

Ken:
I can give you a lot of history, and I don't talk about it because it was a while ago and, and it's hard to get episodes of it available at this point. It was a show called “Talk to the Animals,” which we would, each episode we would go into someone's home who had a dog problem, whatever it was– a dog that dug up their garden. The dog that jumped on people when it came in, a dog that resource guarded, whatever–they were a variety of pretty typical problems. And I would come in and meet with the family, talk about what the problems were. It would give them a training plan, a positive reinforcement training plan to try to solve it. Then I would work with them for a weekend usually, leave my card and say, we'll be back in a couple of weeks. I want you to follow these instructions, call me if you need anything. But really if you follow these rules and try this out, you should make progress.

Then we would go to commercial. We would come back and we would be at a zoo somewhere where I would show an exotic animal who had a similar kind of problem and show how we use that same technique that I just gave that family to solve this behavioral problem with a tiger, with an eagle, with a dolphin, with a rhino, with a variety of different animals that we had at the zoo. And then we would come back to the house of the family that had the problem. And we would get to see how much progress they had made in a couple of weeks. And usually we would get to a point where they were able to resolve the problem.

And we found that a very interesting way to combine my work in the zoological field. And one of the things that was the tagline that we used all the time in the show was if we can use these techniques with exotic animals, imagine what you can accomplish with an animal that is predisposed to being around people. It's so much easier to do this with your pets and, while we're not literally talking to the animals, these techniques allow you to communicate with your animals more clearly. And in a way you are actually talking to the animals. So we ended up doing two seasons of the series. And, we actually were optioned to do a third season, but my schedule was such that I could not really afford to–that program took 60 to 70 hours of time a week to produce. And I still had my full time job at the aquarium at the time, which took 70 or 80 hours a week. So I was just really–

Annie:
The Shedd aquarium, for those who don't know, but the show was shot in Australia in 2002, is that right?

Ken:
It was, I have to look it up, but it sounds about– It was about 18 years ago. So yeah, that's probably right. The couples that I, whose dog problems we solved, all of them were in the Chicago area. We actually filmed those parts of the show in the US so I was able to go for the weekend at work with those couples, be at my full time job, five days a week. And I was not going to Australia for that.

Annie:
But the show aired in Australia.

Ken:
The show was an Australian, we aired it in Australia, the first year of the show, even the zoos that we visited were always zoos in the US. The second year of the show I always visited zoos in Australia because that was where we were popular. It was a very interesting dilemma. The only reason we did not film the third season of the show was because of the fact that we weren't airing in the US. The National Geographic channel was the producer of the show. It had originally been that Animal Planet was going to do a second channel, but they ended up selling the production to the National Geographic channel. But the National Geographic channel had a contract with another trainer, Cesar Milan to do a show in the US, and they weren't allowed to have a competing dog training show on the air in the United States at the same time.

Annie:
Oh my God.

Ken:
So they continued to produce the episode. It was very popular in Australia. We did a couple of seasons of the show there. On the third season we would have gone forward. But ultimately my full time job in the US were more than willing to let me do the show because it was good publicity for the aquarium. But when we realized that we were not ever going to be able to see the show in the US, the aquarium said you can continue to do this show, but it had to be completely on my own time. And when a show like that takes 70 hours a week and your real job takes 80 hours a week and you're trying to figure out how to do 150 hours of time in a given week, it just, I can do that for a couple of years. But by the third year it was just impacting me–

Annie:
This is just–my mind is blown. So in trying to find episodes of this show–and this came out right when “The Dog Whisperer” first started?

Ken:
It was a couple of years after The Dog Whisperer had taken hold. And, yes, we were at a competing show in the Australian market and our show did very well, but we weren't, based on contractual obligations, we were not able to bring it to the US.

Annie:
Well, I've noticed that there seemed to be a lot of enlightened trainers coming out of Australia and New Zealand. And I have to guess that's partially why.

Ken:
It was really interesting. I don't know if that was why. I know the program was very popular. We aired on the channel there opposite Australian Idol and we actually beat Australian Idol, and that's the singing competition, in that time slot, uh, several times. And, I had this momentary period of celebrity because I remember I was doing some contractual work for Disney and I was in Epcot Center in, in Florida, and we were walking. And all of a sudden I was swarmed with all these people who wanted my autograph. And it turned out they were all from Australia and they recognized me from the show. So I did reach a certain level of celebrity status for a period of time with the people in Australia, but it was just for that brief period of time. And then it's been so long since that show aired.

Annie:
This makes me really sad because I feel like there, there really was a moment where like, it could have been Ken Ramirez instead of Cesar Milan on all of our TV screens and that would have been an amazingly good thing for so many people, but mainly myself.[laughs] Cause I think I that that show probably would have excited me and turned me on to how incredible animal training is. But probably, I think that that's the case for many people. Does it make you angry then that Cesar–I mean, I'm not saying this in like, because you could have been a celebrity kind of way. I mean, you are to me, but just in that like Cesar Milan's cockamamie form of what we can generously call dog training, took hold in this country at least.

Ken:
You know, that his show took hold in a lot of countries, and I think that it was his charisma. It was his, there's a number of different things about the way the show is produced that was very popular. And it made for very watchable television for the average person. And, do I wish I had gotten into that slot? Sure. It would have been nice. Do I wish someone else had gotten there? That would have been nice as well.

Annie:
I know you’re gonna say something really generous right now about Cesar. [laughs]

Ken:
No, I look at things like that, I realized things happen the way they happen and I only can control certain things.

Annie:
Right but for me it’s more like I'm not angry for Ken. I'm angry for the dogs of the world and for, and for myself, you know, 18 years ago. But also, to tie back to what we were talking about before, I mean I've asked myself a lot, why is Cesar Milan so popular? And I think to some things you've said, there's a certain charisma, there's a certain underdog quality. He shows the quick fix, which might be because of editing or not, but it's satisfying and punishment can show results right away. It makes for good TV, dah, dah, dah, dah. But I also wonder if part of it has to do with, like the way all of us are schooled growing up and the kind of government that we are controlled by.

Ken:
It's a well produced show and I certainly understand why people were attracted to it and, you know, it's not a show that's on the air anymore. As far as new episodes of the show. It's still in reruns in a variety of places. And you know, I guess in the big scheme of things, my take on it or my look at it is rather than being so focused on that style of training, I still find myself saying, I long for the day that the average pet owner recognizes the value in having good trainers. And if everybody recognized the value of having a trainer, everybody who brought in a dog from a shelter, everybody who owned a pet, realized the training could be valuable to them there. We would not have enough trainers to go around because there'd be so much work that we would have for everybody. But so many people don't even recognize the value of training.

So what I always tell people is if we get to that point where everybody recognizes the value of training, then I'm going to focus my attention on saying, here's why you should focus on this style of training. I still am a very big proponent of telling people why positive reinforcement is the better way to go and what the advantages are. But I'm just happy that someone will reach out to me.

Annie:
So you're, like, talking to like a group of anorexics and you're like, first we're gonna just talk about the benefits of getting food. And then we'll talk about healthy food, but let's just put food in your mouth to begin with.

Ken:
Yeah.

Annie:
Okay. That's an interesting way to look at it. And frankly, I've never thought about it that way before. But I think for me, the reason I haven't thought about it that way is because the way I see it, people are training their dogs all the time without professional help. Whether or not they're meaning to train their dogs, animals are being trained all the time. And it's a matter of us thinking about it.

Ken:
Right. And I know that you know that, but not everybody in the general public recognizes that. And so I just want to clarify my comment. I don't want to get hate mail from positive reinforcement trainers saying that I'm not out there advocating for good, positive reinforcement. I am. But I don't want to waste my energy bashing people who do it a different way than me when I still have plenty of people who aren't even accepting training as a formalized way of dealing with their dogs. I want to push toward that. I want to make that bigger. And if I could get to the point where I have reached the fullest number of people that I can, then I'll focus my attention on this other thing. But the reality is when it comes to trying to convince people about good training, you’re going to be more successful at reaching those people who are open to your ideas as opposed to those people who already accepted another way of doing things.

And I'm happy to get into a debate and happy to help people realize why transitioning would be good. But it's a lot of energy to put there when there are so many people who just could benefit from simple learning how to train positively. And once I reach all of those people, then I'll put more attention on that other group and I just, it's a matter of choosing where to put my energies and believe me,I've got lots of work to keep myself busy. I don't want to put a lot of energy on that.

Annie:
I think my thoughts on it are more along the lines of, the problem is people don't think about behavior. Not so much, people aren't thinking about dog training. It's like that if, in school kids had, you know, one hour of training on how to understand these things and you know, my hope is that it's something people can start to learn about as they learn about dog training, which was my experience. Actually the rabbi who married me and my husband, he had lunch with us a couple of times before we got married and I made some comment about forces controlling our behavior. And he was like, Oh, well, there's nothing that could ever be predicted about human behavior. Or made some sort of comment like that. And I was just like, I'm not going to argue with the rabbi, but gosh.

Ken:
That's a great example of the way most of us have brought up in thinking about behavior and, so that's, it's a challenge and we make little inroads in trying to help people recognize it, but I don't know why there's so much resistance to recognizing that as a science.

Annie:
Going back to what you were saying before about manipulation. Did you see that movie on Netflix about Cambridge Analytica?

Ken:
No. I’m familiar with it, but I haven't seen it.

Annie:
You know, the, the general story of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Ken:
Yes, I do.

Annie:
Well it's really all about manipulation, and it's just, you know, we're all shocked about how manipulated we are all the time. But–so many great stories in this book. I'm particularly interested and hoping that you can talk a little bit about some of your conservation training that you've done. Because I never knew about anything about conservation training and until I started reading your work and hearing you talk about it. And I think it would interest listeners because it's an area of animal training that I think many people probably–I mean we think about animal training helping maybe at a zoo or an aquarium, dog trainers, et cetera. But can you explain what conservation training is and then maybe tell one or two of the stories that you share in the book?

Ken:
Sure. Conservation training is simply a way to use this knowledge that we have of behavior to help adjust, change or modify the behavior of animals in the wild. And it's conservation training, particularly because we get the permits and permission to do this kind of training because we're usually working with an endangered species or trying to correct a problem that is challenging these animals. Usually because of some human encroachment issue or some human activity that has caused that animals population to decline. And, it's about using the knowledge of how behavior works to shape the behavior of these animals in the wild, in their everyday setting.

And it's using what's called remote training. Remote training is this type of training where you are impacting behavior, but the animal itself never really realizes that it's a human that's putting the reinforcers there or putting the punishers there. We are out of the picture as far as the animal’s concerned.

Most notably is a project I'm working on right now in Zambia in which we are trying to reroute a centuries-old migration route that these elephants are taking. And, and these elephants migrate through a little corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo where every year 50 to 70 elephants are slaughtered every single year. And for 20 years, a number of efforts were made to offer the poachers another form of employment, another way to earn money, a different way to put it into tourism. Anything that could be done to entice them to move in another direction, but it was never successful. And so finally–

Annie:
I didn’t know that about that. So they were trying to do the human training first because that was gonna be easier. [laughs]

Ken:
Yes. And one of the challenges of course, with–human training is difficult enough. But when you're talking across cultures and across countries where, the people of Zambia felt very strongly that they wanted to protect their elephants, while the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo seemed much less interested in that, it became a very difficult thing.

And so we finally decided to put forth a project in which we tried to teach the elephants to avoid the Southeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo and route them another route, still getting to their final migration location, but simply changing the route for about 150 to 200 kilometers. And we've been very successful at that and very successful at using positive reinforcement to guide the animals toward a preferable migratory route. We've only been at this for a couple years now, but so far we've had several years of success. The challenge is, they only migrate that direction once a year, so we only have one shot at it each and every year.

But by teaching them a new migratory path, it still leads them to their eventual goal. We are finding that we are able to save 60 to 70 elephants a year. And that population of elephants that has been on the decline over the last 20 years for the first year, in 2020, has shown an increase because of the fact of this rerouting of the elephants that we've done using this positive reinforcement technique.

And this elephant project is just one of several dozen projects that I've been involved with over the years. When I first started working in conservation training, there was a lot of resistance to it. Most people thought you can't change the behavior of wild animals. And how are you going to do that? And you're gonna impact so many other animals. And so we had to do a lot of environmental impact statements, demonstrate to people that there were a lot of different ways that we could approach this.

And now that we've seen that several successful projects implemented and seeing these projects be successful more often, we are beginning to see wildlife biologists recognize that this might be a viable form of shaping behavior. And so I've been involved in a variety of these kinds of projects and, and that's just one of them.

Annie:
The polar bears?

Ken:
Polar bears are another one. We were facing an interesting dilemma. Polar bears due to climate change, were making their way into Alaska further South and into villages and towns more and more often. And these polar bears were posing a threat to the public, to the dogs. And so we came in with a three pronged approach to trying to reshape the polar bears behavior. The first approach, we started with a pilot program in one small town and they were very committed. They had an average of three to 400 polar bear incidents per year that were causing a threat to their dogs and a threat to the citizens.

And so we went in with a three pronged approach, a behavioral approach. The first approach was to help educate the locals as to what to do with their garbage and what to do with meat and stuff that was attracting the polar bears and get rid of that. Secondly, the village that had these sentinels posted in watchtowers around the village, and these sentinels would be watching for polar bears or whatever polar bears would approach the village, they would shoot at them–not to hurt them, not to kill them, but just in an effort to scare them away. But the problem was these villagers didn't understand behavior. They understood if they shoot at the polar bear, it'll scare them and they'll go away. But the polar bears usually would just circle around and come another direction. There was no connecting this firecracker shell to any behavior in particular.

So we went in and helped them understand that if you want the polar bears to avoid things that are human, if you're going to apply this firecracker shell, this rifle shot, that's going to scare them, wait until the nose of that polar bear sniffs the tires, sniffs of the garbage can, sniffs to the fence post. And suddenly the bears began to learn, Oh, it's all of these things that have a human smell that scare me. I should avoid that. And it helped teach the bears to avoid the village.

And then the third phase was to use a baiting or luring technique to help guide the bears to a source of natural food so that they would avoid the village and begin to find other food in, in other places. So by making food less scarce, by making the application of their gunshots more precise and by leading the bears to another location, we managed to over a period of five years, replicate this project with 46 different towns and villages throughout Northern Alaska. And most interesting, the average number of incidents per year prior to the application of these training protocols was about 325 polar bear incidents annually. When we implemented the training protocol, the average number of incidents dropped to four, just four. And again, it was just a really good example of how the little behavioral application–we can adjust behavior in the wild and make changes that allow the bears to thrive and allow the humans to thrive.

Annie:
And it’s that training triad, the dog training Triad, I call it: management, timing and rewards. Or in this case, punishment, managing the environment, figuring out how to reward or punish the appropriate thing with the appropriate timing. And that's what I love about your story. First of all, I also love that it's one of these like, Oh my God, this is so simple, solutions where I'm sure that when you explain this to the people that you're working with, they must've had that sort of reaction of like, Oh, this makes so much sense.

Ken:
Absolutely. After doing a pilot project in one village, we were easily able to get by all the villages to replicate it in other villages because it made so much sense.

Annie:
So much of the time, good dog training is like that. Right? It makes so much sense.

Ken:
But it is fascinating to see how without a trainer going in and pointing out this is what you should do, it never occurred to them that the timing of that gunshot just by being off by a half a minute was the huge difference in what the bear learned.

Annie:
Well, that's the other thing I love is that you really didn't change very much about this. I mean you changed many things, but the actual gunshot was there before and after. It was just the utilization of it. I think it's a really good example of using punishment, but it was already in place and it was just not being used correctly. And by using this thing that was already in place, you made it so much better using this little tweak.

Ken:
And, and it's one of the things that has been–while I am a big proponent of positive reinforcement, and I push people in the direction of using positive reinforcement when possible. In so much of the real world, people use aversive tools, but sadly they don't use them very well. And so consequently, anybody who has to punish their child or punish their dog or punish an employee over and over and over again probably isn't actually using punishment. They're just doing something that's mean or that’s aversive. Because if it were punishment, it would work.

Annie:
Right. It's tragic and amazing. Well, thank you for sharing that story. I also was hoping you could tell people about your work with butterflies.

Ken:
The butterfly project was a fascinating project for me. It came out of the conservation work that I was doing and it was a project that sort of fell into my lap. There was a botanical garden in the UK, that every year they did a themed botanical garden. Every summer they set up this huge botanical garden in a soccer stadium in the UK. And every year they had a different theme. And in 2015, their theme was about the symbiotic relationship between plants and animals. And they decided that with their botanical garden, they wanted to have a huge butterfly population and they ended up having well over 10,000 butterflies that were all around the stadium.

And the director of the butterfly garden had this idea that maybe, for the gala performance where they were going to fundraise for these conservation projects and for wildlife restoration or wild habitat restoration that had to do with plants and the flora of the area, she wondered if butterflies could be trained to fly across the stadium on cue. So that they would fly across the stadium in this beautiful way with the symphony orchestra playing.

And everybody that she contacted first in the UK and then throughout Europe constantly said, I don't know if you can train butterflies. But often many of those individuals would say, but you know, there was this guy in the States who claims that anything is trainable. He always says that you can train an earthworm. So if he can train an earthworm, I bet he could train a butterfly, you should contact him. And so she calls me up and she tells me that five different people had suggested that they didn't think it was possible, but if anybody was going to be able to do it, they should contact me. And she realized after that many people were telling her to contact me, I would be the person that she should talk to.

And so she asked me about the possibility and I said, look, I don't know a lot about butterflies, but I know if you have butterfly biologists on your staff who understand the sensory mechanisms of butterflies, meaning that understand what they eat, what you can use to reinforce them, understand that they can see or hear so that we can cue them, they should be trainable. And realistically having them fly from one end of the stadium to the other end of the stadium is no different than teaching your dog to come to you one call. It's really just a very simple procedure.

And so she says, well, that sounds great. Would you like to be a part of this project? And I said, love to! And then I hung up the phone and kind of freaked myself out thinking, Oh my God, I don't know anything about butterflies. They're pretty. And they fly? So then we began doing our research, and, turned out that there was a number of reinforcers we could use. There was nectar and there was fruit and there was a variety of things. And we tested out a couple of different queuing mechanisms. But ultimately, we basically did a pairing of a cue and the delivery of a reinforcer. And it was a classical conditioning pairing where we just sort of, you know, sound the cue, here's the reinforcer, sound the cue, here's the reinforcer.

And after just two repetitions on our third training session, we were all out there with these bowls of nectar. We sounded the cue and lifted the bowl, the tops off the bowls. After, on our third session when we did it, thousands of butterflies all hovered into the air immediately knowing that their nectar was going to be available to them. And on that third training session, when I saw all these butterflies hover off the branches and move toward the bowls, I said to myself, this is going to work.

And sure enough, in 19 days we managed to train the butterflies to fly from one end of the stadium to the other end of the stadium on cue. And we presented it for the gala. And it was a very big success that I even myself was so moved. When I finally saw the final behavior, I thought, Oh, that's so beautiful. I can't believe it. It was really a very emotional experience.

Annie:
What were the cues for the butterflies?

Ken:
The butterflies had self divided themselves into three different groups by, by species, et cetera. So we had a big group on the North end and the other big group on the South end and another big group on the East. And so we decided to try three different reinforcers and three different cues. And all three of the cues ended up working. We had a subsonic vibrating cathode, which is a vibration that sounds; a very high piercing tone; and we used an LED light. Those were the three different cues we used each for the different groups of butterflies. And so because we trained them on a different cue, we actually were able to actually have three separate flights during the London symphony orchestra, played this beautiful piece. And then on one cue the butterflies took off from the North end. And then on the next cue they took off from the South.

Annie:
And what I love about the story too is that butterflies have short lives, you explain, and so some of them ended up learning from other butterflies, even if you hadn’t been the one to teach them.

Ken:
One of the things that surprised me when I started working on the project, nobody bothered to tell me about this. As we were working with the butterflies, one of the biologists said, well, this particular species has a life expectancy of six weeks. And I went, what?! You mean, you mean these guys are gonna all be dead by the time this gala performance is going to be–

Annie:
It’s very hard to train a dead butterfly.

Ken:
Yes! And they said, well, not all of them, just this one species has that short life span. First, I was freaking out. Many butterflies have several months lifespans, six month lifespans, et cetera. But what we did find is that butterflies were coming out of their cocoons on a pretty regular basis and as the new butterflies would join the population, we didn't have to really train them. They just followed the other butterflies, and learned to fly based on what the other butterflies did. So we had a very successful project. It was just one summer of training and as I said, we trained it in 19 days, maintained the behavior for about two and a half weeks more. The gala happened and that was very, very popular. Very successful.

Annie:
You're so generous with your time. I don't want to eat up too much of your time, but I did want to ask you one final question, which is, as I mentioned to you, I have lots of mom friends who have babies around my daughter's age. And I've had several conversations with them about sleep training. And I'd say most of them ended up going the cry it out method with children. Which, I'm not super comfortable with it, because I think if any animal who is so small and vulnerable is crying, it's probably because the animal has a need that needs to be met. Even if I'm not certain what the need is. Rather than it, like, manipulating me.

I should say I don't have majorly strong feelings in one direction or another, but decided that for our daughter, we, my husband and I decided we weren't gonna do that. However, I have not come up with a very good training plan to get my daughter to sleep through the night. And, the only thing that really makes that okay is the fact that I can drink a lot of coffee throughout the day. So I was wondering, expert trainer that you are, if you have any recommendations for shaping good sleep.

Ken:
I do and I don't. I'll say this. When my daughter was born, which my daughter is 31 now, so it was 31 years ago. And as someone who was working with animals all the time, and as I said, I've never thought of training as being exclusively an animal related activity, It's just a behavior and all creatures behave the same way. I was determined that I would teach my daughter using nothing but positive reinforcement. My wife at the time was not necessarily fully behind that, but when it came to sleep training, she was very happy to suggest that if I wanted to take over feeding at night, that she was all for letting me do that. And if I could teach her to sleep through the night, that was going to be up to me.

And so I embarked on that process. And so, I want to remind everybody that this was 30 years ago, there's all sorts of new thoughts about breastfeeding versus bottle feeding and a lot of different opinions about that. And I'm not an expert on that. And I want to remind people that I just did this with my daughter. I'm not recommending this as a protocol for everybody else. I just used a lot of logic and thinking to myself, how do I teach my daughter to sleep through the night. And recognizing that, early on, babies need nutrition on a regular basis, and so they need it at regular intervals. But the key for me was I found that like with most creatures, my daughter would wake up crying, ready to eat at pretty predictable times. It would vary sometimes, but it was pretty predictable about that 2:00 AM or at 4:00 AM or whatever the times were.

And so I realized that what I needed to do was be prepared. I needed to be up, not when she was crying, but before she woke up and cried, and be waiting there next to her crib ready to take it. And then when she would wake up, I would engage with her, play with her. And then because she was quiet and engaged with me and playing, I would feed her. And then I was able to pretty accurately predict. And then as I was able to do that, once my pediatrician suggested that she could go four hours, five hours or longer periods of time without the bottle, without milk, I would just play with her for longer periods of time, find a number of activities that would engage her. She would wake up, I would do some of those things. I would hold her, I would get her active with me so that she wasn't crying right away. And then I would feed her the bottle as you know, five minutes later, then 10 minutes later than 15 minutes later.

And what ended up happening is she then began sleeping 10 minutes later and 15 minutes later. And I gradually, over time–I want to say by the time the pediatrician felt like she could go five to six hours without, without a bottle, that was really all we needed. Because I was a night owl. My wife was an early morning person, so my wife would go to bed at nine o'clock at night. I would take over the feeding regimen all the way up, and then my wife would be up by five or six o'clock in the morning. She got a good night's sleep cause she went to bed early. I then went on, continued sleeping and she took over at that point. But we were able to get my daughter Julie to sleep for that five or six hours uninterrupted in about six weeks time, seven weeks time, once we started working on it.

I was just using the typical training techniques that I'd always used. It was a shaping plan. Exactly.

Annie:
My takeaway for my own situation, which is my daughter wakes up at some point in the night and comes to sleep with me, which is not a terrible thing. I’m kind of okay with it. But if I want to have her sleep through the night, maybe I need to at least figure out exactly what time she's waking up. So that I can preempt it, cause it's all such a blur.

Ken:
Yeah. And for me it was, I was very much paying attention to it and I was often a late night sleep–I don't usually go to bed till two or three in the morning anyway. So from nine o'clock when my wife would go to sleep until 2:00 AM I was already awake. So it wasn't like I was having to force myself to stay asleep. I would just move my work load or whatever I was doing into the room and watch for it and began to predict and saw how predictable it was and I was able to get there in advance so that I could occupy her and keep her engaged, entertained, and then reinforce her so that crying isn't the thing that got her the bottle. It was other activities and other play that we were doing and we were able to gradually approximate that longer and longer.

And I think there are so many issues revolving around childcare and raising kids that have to do with not only understanding behavior, but there are all sorts of cultural issues and other things that come into play.

Annie:
Do you have feelings about “cry it out” as a method?

Ken:
I just think that, you know, a kid crying is their way of saying that they need something, and unless you really learn to differentiate between the I want attention cry and I've just hurt myself cry. I think there's a risk at allowing a baby to cry– I'm not opposed to somebody saying let them cry it out. But I as a parent feel like I'm not being attentive to their needs. I would always tell trainers of animals that, if your animal is behaving in an odd way, you need to be very attuned to what that means. They behave that way for a reason. And so, I decided that crying serves a purpose. I just would rather not have the crying. And so let's find another way for you to indicate that you want food or that you want a change or that you want something, and crying doesn't have to be the way to get that. And so that really helped a lot. But what it requires is me to be very attuned to the baby so that I am able to provide those needs. Otherwise it backfires on you.

Annie:
Well, from a dog training perspective, and I definitely would not have had this thought process before I got into dog training, but it seems to me that like if the animal, if a dog is barking, barking, barking, and you put a shock collar on the dog or you do whatever you need to do to stop the barking, you might get rid of the barking, but you're not necessarily getting rid of whatever the issue is that's causing the barking. And it can then come out in some other way, and I'd rather, you know, my baby not get sick or something.

Ken:
Right. Well, that's the important thing about recognizing that so much about problem solving is about the science of behavior, is looking at the function of that behavior and understanding that crying serves a function. And so what you need to do is if you're going to replace it, you need to still meet that baby or that dog or that animal's needs. And so crying serves a purpose and you have to still meet the goals, whether that's change the baby, feed the baby, do the thing that it needs, you just would like it to indicate–

Annie:
That’s why I wonder about the babies who are crying it out. Are they still feeling silent agony, but they're not making any noise. I mean, it's hard to imagine, because yes they seem like they probably are going to grow up to be fine individuals, but that's where my brain goes…

Ken:
You know that goes right to your question. You can do things in five different ways and it still works. And it turns out that if you're a punishment user, you can still work. If you're a positive reinforcement, it still works, and so you don't even look at the behavior aspect of it as much because you're finding a solution anyway.

Annie:
Well, Ken, out of all the different types of animals you could be focused on right now, your job at Karen Pryor puts you in charge of helping so many of us help people with their dogs. Thank you for being a dog trainer trainer.

Ken:
I enjoy it and hopefully it'll be something I can do. For a long time

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Annie:
I hope you enjoyed this conversation and I hope you will check out Ken's book. I will link to it in the show notes and also to his 1999 book, which should be in every animal trainer’s library, Animal Training: Successful Animal Management Through Positive Reinforcement. It is a thick book, but that's really a textbook, whereas The Eye of the Trainer is filled with just remarkable stories of Ken working with all kinds of animals in every part of the world you could possibly imagine. Even if you're not that into training, I still think if you like animals, this book is just such a pleasure to read. You know, there was that book series and the TV series, “All Creatures Great and Small,” which was all these stories–a vet. Well, this is the animal training version of that series.

And I just want to mention one of the stories that it includes just to demonstrate what a powerful man Ken is when it comes to seriously impacting the welfare of the Earth's wildlife. A few years ago, Ilana Alderman, who is an amazing animal trainer, and one of my good friends called me up in tears because she had just learned that Ken had been shot at and they weren't sure he was going to make it. And of course all I could think of is why would anybody want to shoot Ken Ramirez? You know who? Elephant poachers. He tells this harrowing story in the book and it just drives home how impactful training based conservation work can and could be.

You can learn more about Ken at clickertraining.com. He's been going live there every Thursday from his Washington state ranch. These are really excellent broadcasts. You can also find him on Twitter @KenKPCT. Special thanks to Lizzie and Bill, AKA Toast Garden for doing a version of “Animal Fair” for this episode. You can find them on Youtube. Youtube.com/toastgarden.

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