SHORT HISTORY OF OPERANT CONDITIONING AND WHERE IT BEGAN
AKA "CLICKER TRAINING"
B.F. Skinner 1904-1990
B. F. Skinner received his PhD in 1931. In 1936 he took an academic position at the University of Minnesota where he wrote The Behavior of Organisms.
With pigeons, he developed the ideas of "operant conditioning" and "shaping behavior." This is unlike Pavlov's "classical conditioning," where an existing behavior (salivating for food) is shaped by associating it with a new stimulus (bell ringing).
Operant conditioning is the rewarding of a partial behavior or a random act that approaches the desired behavior. Operant conditioning can be used to shape behavior. If the goal is to have a dog turn in a circle to the left, a reward is given for any small movement to the left. When the dog catches on to that, the reward is given for larger movements to the left, and so on, until the dog has turned a complete circle before getting the reward.
Add that to “classical conditioning” and you get an animal giving you behavior for a secondary motivator (a bell, whistle, or click) and receiving a primary motivator (food, toy, praise, etc.) at a later time (seconds, minutes, or even hours). No punishment.
In 1942, Marian and Keller Breland joined Skinner to train pigeons to guide WW2 bombs. That experience prompted the Brelands to found Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE) in 1943. ABE was the first company to use operant conditioning. By 1947, ABE chickens were advertising farm feeds. ABE trainers trained more than 140 different species, and tens of thousands of animals. The Brelands view of behavior is outlined in their landmark 1961 publication, THE MISBEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS. They proposed an interaction between and a continuum of operant and respondent behavior.
A Short Biography of Dr. Bob Bailey
"I describe myself as a behavioral-systems analyst and engineer, small-businessman, field biologist, animal trainer, and teacher, not necessarily in that order. I was born in Ohio and grew up in Los Angeles during WWII, before the rest of the world had discovered what was then idyllic Southern California. My early years were spent trekking the desert looking for animals in the San Fernando Valley, and swimming, surfing, and fishing along the California coastline. My father was a precision machinist and worked for MGM Motion Picture Studios, so I am a movie brat. I was educated at UCLA (Biology and Chemistry). I was a Teaching and Research Assistant, and I spent a lot of time in the desert and at-sea. I became enamored with animal training animals, both in the lab and in the wild. I was largely self-taught, and read B. F. Skinner and Keller and Marian Breland, among others.
My first real job after the military was at the UCLA School of Medicine, researching psychotropic drugs. Leaving UCLA, I worked for short time for California Fish and Game doing at-sea studies. I then became the US Navy Marine Mammal Program’s first Director of Training (1962), and was formally introduced to the Brelands and scientific animal training. It was at that time that my life became intimately and inextricably connected with Brelands’. The Brelands taught the US Navy trainers, including me, the basics of operant conditioning using chickens as models. I believe it was a combination of the Brelands’ communication skills and my training the chickens that opened my eyes to what real training was all about. My primary claim to fame at this time probably would be the Navy’s first open-ocean release of a dolphin (1964). In 1965 I left the Navy to join the Brelands, in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Marian and Keller Breland had studied under Skinner until 1944. They left the University of Minnesota and founded Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), the first company to use operant conditioning to train animals. The Brelands were routinely using “clickers” (then, called “crickets”) by 1944-1945 for training dogs, cats, parakeets, and other animals. The Brelands, through ABE, was the first to use operant conditioning for training dolphins (1955), whales (1957), parrots (1957), and many other animals. The Brelands had written two landmark scientific papers, both in the American Psychologist – A New Field Of Applied Animal Psychology(1951), and – The Misbehavior Of Organisms (1961). The first paper reported the beginning of scientific animal training, and the second redefined the roles of operant and respondent conditioning in animal training. Keller died in 1965. I married Marian Breland 1976. We had already formed a close partnership in the study and training of animals.
Our company, ABE, had more than 43 full time employees, and our business interests were world wide. Over the years ABE behavioral technicians had trained ravens, vultures, pigeons, dogs, cats, dolphins, sea lions, and many other species to perform in difficult circumstances and in free environments. I trained thousands of animals representing over 120 different species. Over the years Marian and I had taught many trainers using as our favorite behavioral model, the barnyard chicken. Marian and I closed-down ABE in 1990, but she continued teaching at Henderson State University, where she had taught psychology classes since 1981.
Marian and I continued our consulting and teaching activities. We began a public version of our operant conditioning workshops using chickens in 1995. We began our operant conditioning classes in Hot Springs in 1997. Sadly, Marian died in 2001. I continued the classes in Hot Springs until 2004. I continue to teach for others, and to consult with private companies and governmental agencies in the USA and abroad."
Life at Chicken Workshops
