Karen Pryor passed away earlier this month.
I encourage you to read this obituary that the New York Times wrote about Pryor; it is a well-written overview of her life and accomplishments.
I met Karen several times at conferences, and I had the great fun of hosting her as an invited speaker for the Art and Science of Animal Training Conference in 2017.
One thing I loved about Karen was that she understood the power of reinforcing approximations, both with animal learners and human learners.
She was able to revolutionize animal training by organizing, supporting, and bringing together people who were interested in finding better ways to train animals.
Shaping behaviors with positive reinforcement
My first introduction to positive reinforcement training and shaping was from Karen Pryor’s books.
While thinking about Karen, I spent some time browsing my copy of Lads Before the Wind, which Karen wrote in 1975.
In the shaping chapter, I came across this quote, which I have always loved:
“The art of shaping, the game of it, is in thinking up what to shape and figuring out how to get there. …
The path to the desired end point can take any direction; there are probably as many ways to shape a given behavior as there are trainers to train it.”
The beauty about shaping with positive reinforcement is that training turns into a fun puzzle for both the animal and the human. There is no longer one “right” way to teach a certain behavior.
Training horses with positive reinforcement
Thinking about Karen Pryor and my first experiences with shaping takes me back to 2008, when I first read Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog.
At the time, I was spending lots of time riding a little bay quarter horse named Casey Jane (CJ).
I was out of college and living in central Kansas. CJ’s owner gave my permission to ride CJ whenever I wanted, in exchange for helping with some chores around her farm.
However, there was one problem.
CJ didn’t want anything to do with me. It would take me an hour or more to catch her. Eventually, it got where I couldn’t catch her at all.
Enter Karen Pryor and her classic book, Don’t Shoot the Dog. I admit — I wasn’t sure about using food to train horses, but I had run out of other options.
Amazingly, it worked! 
It wasn’t fast, partly because I had no idea what I was doing. But, the transformation was profound. Eventually, I had a horse who would meet me at the gate and who wanted to play.
As I experimented with shaping, I found it fascinating to try and find the right approximations to communicate with CJ and, later, with other animal learners.
I realized that positive reinforcement and shaping gave me so many more possibilities for how to teach a behavior. I was limited only by my creativity.
As well, I found this to be a lot more fun than the traditional training I was doing at the time — a lot more fun for both me and the animal.
What I learned from CJ and Karen Pryor made me want to learn all I could about positive reinforcement and the science of behavior. This quest eventually led me back to school, to earn a master’s in behavior analysis from the University of North Texas.
I only have a handful of pictures of CJ, but lots of memories. And, I have Karen Pryor to thank for showing me a different way.
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