April 05, 2021

Bonus: Training wisdom from page 9 of Dr. Bob Bailey's website (Plus: Join Annie for a film screening and Q and A with Dr. Bailey on April 24th)

13 minutes

Bonus episode! Annie reads some casually-written but oh-so-important training tips from the website belonging to Dr. Bob Bailey, behavior1.com. Annie will be showing Dr. Bailey's film on the history of his company, Animal Behavior Enterprises, and the history of operant conditioning, and then hosting a conversation with Dr. Bailey, on April 24th at 4PM Eastern. Sign up at http://schoolforthedogs.com/bailey

Dr. Bob Bailey is an animal trainer, inventor, designer, writer, teacher, diver, and photographer. He is the widower of B.F. Skinner's graduate student, Dr. Marian Breland Bailey. All proceeds from the screening will go to the Marian Breland Bailey Memorial Fund at Arkansas' Henderson State University.

About the Baileys

http://www.behavior1.com/page8.html

Page 9

http://www.behavior1.com/page9.html

More about Patient Like The Chipmunks

http://www.behavior1.com/page5.html

Dr. Sophia Yin's video about Chicken Camp with Dr. Bob Bailey from 2000

https://archive.org/details/Chicken_Training_Camp_2000

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

Bob Bailey, or I should say Dr. Bob Bailey, is a trainer who lives in Arkansas, and I’m kind of obsessed with him. He was both business partner and husband to Marian Breland Bailey, also Dr. Marian Breland Bailey, who together with her first husband, Keller Breland and Bob Bailey who came to work with them before Keller’s untimely death in the early 1960s, the three of them built this company called Animal Behavior Enterprises, which did so many really unique things in the realm of animal training. They train animals mostly for commercial purposes to do things that we’re pretty incredible.

One thing they did was create these kind of like, I guess maybe you call it like a diorama with moving parts in it for animals. And they train like over a hundred different species of animals, but like an animal in this Lucite, basically Skinner box, they would train these animals to do all kinds of crazy funny tricks, like play basketball, play baseball, dance, play tic-tac-toe.

And I actually, and then they would ship these all around the world, and I actually grew up at, the arcade that I used to go to as a kid in Manhattan had a dancing chicken and a tic-tac-toe playing chicken that I was pretty obsessed with. Actually my whole family, we all loved the tic-tac-toe chicken and would discuss the tic-tac-toe chicken. Never in my childhood did I think about where this chicken came from and whether the chicken was actually trained or how it was trained totally did not cross my mind.

I guess if I thought about it, I would have thought the dancing chicken was like being electrocuted and that’s why it was jumping or something, although I was completely off base. Anyway, these amusements were part of what Animal Behavior Enterprises did among other things, which included training animals for the military, training animals for film.

Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

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