Animal Trainer Karen Pryor Has Died

Karen Pryor died on January 4th.  She was 92.

Ms. Pryor was a marine mammal trainer who first trained porpoises and dolphins in Hawaii at a sea life park founded by her husband, Tap Pryor, using a 20-page manual written by Ron Turner, a student of B. F. Skinner. Turner was training dolphins at Marineland in California using bridging techniques pioneered by Marianne and Keller Breland, also former students of B.F. Skinner. 

Though she had little experience training dogs, Ms. Pryor thought rewards-based reinforcement training could be used to train dogs in much the same way it was used to train dolphins.  

Ms. Pryor’s 1984 book, “Don’t Shoot the Dog,” (a title created by the publisher) popularized rewards based reinforcement training though, in fact, it gave very little practical information about dog training and was more of a biography sprinkled with anecdote and theory.

Ironically, Karen Pryor, could not let her own Border Terrier off leash in the woods, and used an Invisible Fence to keep that same dog in the yard.

On her web site Ms. Pryor explained her success with a low prey drive Poodle, but her failure with her own high prey drive Border Terrier:

“Going from that collie to terriers in the woods is just a shaping staircase; if you want to do it, it can be done, but it involves a lot of steps. For me, that's too much like work. My practical solution is a mix of training and management. The backyard is fenced, and there the dogs can bark and chase squirrels all they want. Outside the front door, on the sidewalk, we enjoy a shaped behavior of stalking squirrels, with an occasional brief 'chase' reinforcer. In the woods, my poodle, whose lust for squirrels is mitigated by his general timidity, can be off-leash, because he was quite easily shaped to come when called, even from squirrels. My 17-year-old border terrier, however, stays on-leash in the woods. From her standpoint, it's a lot better than no woods at all."

In “Don't Shoot the Dog” Ms. Pryor noted that she relied on an Invisible Fence to keep her Border Terrier in the yard:

"I used [a high voltage ‘Invisible Fence’ shock collar] when my terrier and I lived in a house in the woods. An actual fence would have been a perpetual invitation to try to dig under it or escape through an open gate; the conditioned warning signal and the Invisible Fence were far more secure."

In 1992 Ms. Pryor teamed up with dog trainer Gary Wilkes to demonstrate “clicker training“ for dogs, which proved to be a powerful tool for shaping uncoded tricks, but which was far less effective at suppressing or stopping self-rewarding or instinctive behavior. 

Mr. Wilkes had, up to that point, trained over a 1,000 dogs using clicker training, and brought that practical tool and term into Ms. Pryor’s world of theory.  “Clickers” were not mentioned at all in Ms. Pryor’s 1984 book.

Acolytes of Ms. Pryor tended to ignore her self-admitted dog training failures and to prosletyze “pure positive” and “force free” dog trainjng as a differentiating marketing gimmick, often incorrectly crediting Ms. Pryor with inventing clicker and rewards-based training. 

In 2007 Ms. Pryor developed an on-line dog training franchise called the “Karen Pryor Academy”.

Ms. Pryor’s second husband was Jon Lindbergh, son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

In recent years, Ms. Pryor suffered from age-related dementia.