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

How To Train Your Dog With Love And Science - Dog Training with Annie Grossman, School For The Dogs

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.

Learn more about Dr. Vargas:

https://www.juliesvargas.com/

Learn more about Karen Pryor:

https://karenwpryor.com/biography/

Learn more about the BF Skinner Foundation:

http://bfskinner.org

Books:

Don't Shoot The Dog!

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Dog-Teaching-Training/dp/1860542387

Reaching The Animal Mind

https://www.amazon.com/Reaching-Animal-Mind-Clicker-Training/dp/0743297776

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Partial 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

Full Transcript at SchoolForTheDogs.com/Podcast