3 Quotes & Sayings By Karen Pryor

Karen Pryor is a clinical psychologist and a leading trainer of human behavior. Her research on animal learning and cognition has been instrumental in the development of applied behavioral analysis. She has been a pioneer in the field since its inception. Pryor's research has been instrumental in establishing the science of humane education, which is based upon the theory that all behavior is learned Read more

In 1973, she founded the Comer School for Kids, a residential school for children with learning disabilities. It was the first school in the United States to train teachers to work with students who have learning disabilities. In 1973, she founded "Animal Behavior Enterprises," a company that trains animals for movies, television, and commercials.

She also developed "Pryor's Playful Puppy Program," which teaches children how to be more playful and sociable. Pryor was a pioneer in the field of dolphin-assisted therapy, influencing many schools and corporations to invest in training dolphins as therapy animals.

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Training is a loop, a two-way communication in which an event at one end of the loop changes events at the other, exactly like a cybernetic feedback system; yet many psychologists treat their work as something they do to a subject, not with the subject. Karen Pryor
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The porpoises and whale themselves, in their quests for entertainment, often created problems. One summer a fashion developed in the training tanks (I think Keiki started it) for leaning out over the tank wall and seeing how far you could balance without falling out. Several animals might be teetering on the tank edge at one time, and sometimes one or another did fall out. Nothing much happened to them, except maybe a cut or a scrape from the gravel around the tanks; but of course we had to run and pick them up and put them back in. Not a serious problem, if the animal that fell out was small, but if it was a 400-pound adult bottlenose, you had to find four strong people to get him back, and when it happened over and over again, the people got cross. We feared too, that some animal would fall out at night or when no one was around and dry out, overheat, and die. We yelled at the porpoises, and rushed over and pushed them back in when we saw them teetering, but that just seemed to add to the enjoyment of what I'm sure the porpoises thoguht of as a hilariously funny game. Fortunately they eventually tired of it by themselves. Karen Pryor