School For The Dogs Podcast

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