If you've ever trained a dog with a dog with a clicker, you can thank Karen Wylie Pryor '46. That also goes for cats, horses, birds, zoo animals—even humans.
Karen is the behavioral scientist and animal trainer who helped devise the widely used method of clicker training that favors positive reinforcement over punishment.
Like most dog owners of her generation, Karen trained her family Weimaraner using a choke chain. But after graduating from Cornell in 1954, she moved to Hawaii and became a dolphin trainer. At Sea Life Park she pioneered the use of “operant conditioning.”
Karen’s innovation was simple but revolutionary: She would blow a whistle whenever the dolphins performed a desired task and reward them with fish. By marking a behavior as it happens, the animal learns which actions are being rewarded.
“It was a completely new way to train,” says Karen. “And it didn’t matter what kind of species we were working with. They all responded beautifully.”
Indeed the method can be, and has been, applied to stop almost any type of undesirable behavior—from cats scratching furniture to messy roommates. Karen has even helped New York’s Monte Fiore Medical Center employ clicker training to teach medical residents basic surgical techniques, such as how to grip a drill and how to stabilize a drill tip.
The breakthrough was the subject of Karen’s bestselling book Don’t Shoot the Dog!, first published in 1985 and since translated into 18 languages. She hit on the clicker as a training device years later when a colleague saw a newspaper ad for a plastic clicker device. It turned out to be the perfect behavior marker for animal training and has earned Karen worldwide acclaim.
Her business, Karen Pryor Clicker Training, has since become a leading resource for operant conditioning and clicker training method, and hosts two annual “Clicker Expos” (three-day conferences that teach the method to animal owners).
Karen sold off the last of her shares in the company in 2017 and is now at work on her 11th book, an autobiography containing stories from her multifaceted career (she also spent a decade as a consultant to the tuna industry, developing practices for dolphin-safe fishing). She lives in Boston with a clicker-trained rescue cat named Leo and has taken up competitive ballroom dancing.
“I like to watch the clicker magic continuing to grow,” says Karen, “because when people come into that world, they see things differently. It changes your perspective and makes learning new skills much easier.”
This article was originally published in the spring 2018 issue of Foote Prints magazine.