Show Notes
After Marian Bailey died, Dr. Bob Bailey was ready to be done. He had promised her on her deathbed that he would keep teaching, and then he got discouraged enough to start looking at other things he could do with his time. Two women talked him out of it. Cheryl Trotter drove up from Houston and Carolyn Clark came down from Canada, and between them they told him they would help and they would not let him quit. Everything that came after, Sweden, Japan, China, and the workshops that built a generation of trainers, happened because those two would not let go of it.
Carolyn joins Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey from near Ottawa, Ontario. She started as a schoolteacher who kept two chickens named Plum and Henrietta in the back of her classroom, came through Bob's chicken class as a student, and ended up his teaching assistant in Hot Springs. She opened Carolark Dog Training in 1992, named for Carol and Clark, and built it into one of the first schools in North America to teach clicker training and puppy socialization, a room that would go on to host Bob Bailey, Karen Pryor, Turid Rugaas, and Kay Laurence. Then she handed the company to her own staff so she could travel and teach. Carolark is still running in the Ottawa area today under owners who kept the name and kept the methods. Along the way there was a chicken named Fang that nailed Carolyn hard enough that she named it, banks of chickens wheeled out to a hotel parking garage every night in Hot Springs, homemade smell filters, a night watchman who cost Bob two thousand dollars, and a little yellow card that trainers still line up to have signed.
3 Key Takeaways
1. Behavior is lawful. Kirsten came up on old-fashioned methods and had a lot to unlearn. What changed everything was Bob and Carolyn redirecting her every time she wanted to explain a dog by what had happened to it in the past. Behavior is lawful. It is science. You can work with that. You cannot work with a story.
2. Reinforce the people, not just the animals. Carolyn worked the room. A wink and a quiet "that was very good" while a student thought nobody was watching. Bob handed out little yellow cards to anyone who did something well, and students lined up at the end of the week to get them signed. Both of them will tell you the same thing: people need to be caught doing what they enjoy and pointed in that direction.
3. The difficult animal is the one that makes you good. Fang was fierce. Fang nailed Carolyn and got named for it, and then went on to a long career terrorizing new trainers and fixing their timing. An easy bird lets you stay sloppy.
Quick Lessons
1. Nobody builds a career in this alone. Bob almost stopped, and two people would not let him.
2. Most of the work is the part nobody sees. Students saw cages sitting at the back of the room. Bob saw a van, a trailer, a thousand pounds of feed, and several days on the road before the class ever started.
3. Take it outside your own discipline. Carolyn brought chickens into an elementary classroom and taught kids how to handle them, and she used the same reinforcement principles on the people in her dog classes as on the dogs.
4. Say yes to the road. Carolyn gave her company to her staff so she could travel and teach, and that decision is why her reach went past Ottawa.
5. Build it so it outlives you. Carolark has changed hands more than once and still carries the name and the positive methods. That is what a legacy actually looks like.
6. Behavior is lawful, and reinforcement is a process.
More from Precision Animal Training
Kirsten has a way of describing how modern dog training grew up, and it comes in three phases. First the scientific one, when the Brelands' and Baileys' work came through the chicken workshops and the field found out there was a science underneath it. Then the professional one, when it turned out that loving animals is not a business plan. And now the ethical one. Don Hanson has lived all three of them, and because he is a prolific writer, he wrote them down while they were happening. Thirty years of this field's history exists in his archive whether the field asked for it or not.
Mike Wood interviewed Shelley for a job in the Florida Keys on a glass bottom boat. They were both married to other people. Years later, both divorced, he hired her again to come to Mexico, and that is where it turned into a marriage. It is also where two trainers with one dolphin enclosure turned into close to thirty facilities in nine countries with more than two thousand employees.
Bob Bailey has been watching this field for sixty or seventy years, and I have been watching it with him, and his verdict is blunt. More dog businesses have failed on the business end than on the dog training end. Veronica Boutelle watched the same thing happen from the other side. She was Director of Behavior and Training at the San Francisco SPCA, where Jean Donaldson's Academy for Dog Trainers ran out of her department, and she would check in with graduates a year later and find them back in the careers they had tried to escape, or picking up part-time work to make rent. Not because they could not train. Because nobody had taught them how to run the thing. So she built it. Veronica and founding partner Gina Phairas launched dogbiz in late 2003 and are coming up on twenty-five years of teaching trainers the part that keeps the lights on. In this conversation Veronica tells Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey how the SF SPCA brought Chicken Camp to San Francisco by selling tickets to local trainers to cover it, how Bob flew out to headline her grand opening with a night of newly declassified government stories and the raven cameras, and how COVID turned a hastily built free six week program called Survive and Thrive into two thousand trainers from around the world and then into Thrive, the group coaching program still running today. She also says the thing most positive reinforcement trainers need to hear about their rates, and it is not comfortable. 3 Key Takeaways 1. You are running three businesses at once, whether you know it or not. Training animals is one skill set. Coaching the humans who live with the animal is a second, and if you do not change the person's behavior nothing you do with the dog sticks. Running the business is a third. Most trainers invest continuing education in the first one only.
Vicky Darnell did not want the puppy. The plan was to get herself trained up first and then bring another dog into the house, and that is not how it worked out. Tiz came home early. Three weeks later Vicky was sitting in her first Chicken Workshop. What she carried back to Chicagoland was not a chicken trick. It was timing, criteria, rate of reinforcement, and the nerve to stop a session that is going sideways instead of hoping it comes around. Tiz started trialing shortly after she turned six months old, the youngest age a dog can compete in UKC Nosework, and finished her Grand Champion at eleven months. Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey talk with Vicky about what actually transferred from the bird room to the trial floor. Vicky has run dog sporting events for thirteen years and has taken the discrimination class twice, and she still describes the workshop the way everyone does once they have been through it: you cannot comprehend it until you are standing there. Bob puts the principle plainly. You get what you reinforce, not what you want. Kirsten tells on Vicky for walking the hallway between the classroom and the bird room muttering seven seconds to herself, then watched her run that same clock at a nosework trial months later.
On this episode of Precision Animal Training, hosts Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey sit down with renowned Veterinary Behaviorist Dr. Ian Dunbar for a wide-ranging conversation on how animal training has evolved. Dr. Dunbar traces his path from watching animals as a child to pioneering puppy classes and putting early socialization at the center of good training. The discussion returns again and again to positive reinforcement, the power of shaping small improvements, and the need for trainers to observe real behavior and use simple, measurable data. Dr. Bailey and Dr. Dunbar talk about the Brelands’ work with chickens as a training model and argue that trainers should rely less on tools and more on clear communication between people and animals. The episode is a reminder to notice small wins and keep training scientific and enjoyable.