Show Notes
In this episode of Precision Animal Training, Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey explore the evolution and global impact of modern animal training. They discuss the Baileys’ and Brelands’ pioneering workshops, the challenges of traveling with chickens, and Marian’s health struggles, which eventually led to Dr. Bob Bailey taking the lead at Animal Behavior Enterprises.
The legacy of their methods spread worldwide as students brought the knowledge back to their home countries. After Marian’s passing, invitations for Dr. Bob to teach internationally grew, expanding the reach of their work even further.
The conversation highlights the universality of behavioral principles across species, shares the story behind innovations like the “keep going” signal, and touches on the human side of things - resilience, mentorship, and adaptation - that have shaped animal training’s effectiveness and global influence. Kirsten and Dr. Bob also reflect on the importance of maintaining scientific rigor while staying open to curiosity and new ideas. 3 Key Takeaways
1. The Spread of Animal Training Methods Worldwide Dr. Bob Bailey explained that the global expansion of their techniques came largely from students who attended workshops in the US and then took the methods back to their own countries. International teaching invitations increased after Marian’s passing, helping spread the methodology even wider.
2. Scientific Integrity vs. "Woo Woo" Science Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey stressed the importance of scientific rigor in animal training. Dr. Bob cautioned against teaching unproven or speculative “woo woo” ideas, emphasizing that only what can be observed and measured should be presented to students.
3. Innovation in Animal Training: The "Keep Going" Signal The episode covers the development and power of the “keep going” signal - a tool for maintaining desirable behavior at a distance over time. Dr. Bob described experiments showing how continuous signals (like a whistle or click) could keep animals engaged in tasks, revolutionizing long-distance training in open environments.
Quick Training Lessons From The Episode
Here are the key takeaways Kirsten wants listeners to carry with them:
1. The principles of animal training are universal - they work across species and situations. Commit to the process, not just the individual animal.
2. Real innovation comes from careful observation, measurement, and adaptation. If you can’t observe it, you can’t improve it.
3. The “keep going” signal and bridging techniques can dramatically boost how quickly and confidently animals learn, especially over distance and in difficult environments.
4. The global reach of these ideas comes from dedicated students who take them home and apply them in their own communities.
5. These principles have proven their value across many settings - from zoos to working dog teams - showing their versatility and relevance.
6. History provides a strong foundation, but the future of animal training depends on critical thinking, openness to new information, and the willingness to let go of ideas that don’t hold up. Embrace knowledge, but release the “woo woo.”
7. Supporting and protecting students matters just as much as the material itself. There’s real responsibility that comes with sharing powerful - and sometimes controversial - information.
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.
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.
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.