Show Notes
Show Notes
On this episode, Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey sit down with longtime student and class assistant Mimmi Pacerek to explore the unique and transformative experience of participating in chicken training workshops. They highlight why these programs deliver such powerful value for animal trainers at every level. At their core, the workshops are designed to train people, not just animals, by placing participants in situations that demand quick, effective decisions under pressure. A central theme is the importance of adapting teaching methods to suit diverse groups and individual learners, using stress thoughtfully to spark real growth. The conversation dives into the personal journeys of participants, the power of unlearning outdated practices, and the irreplaceable role of hands-on experience, mentorship, and community. The episode closes by celebrating the supportive network and lasting professional relationships that emerge from these intensive training experiences.
3 Key Takeaways 1. The Value of Hands-On Animal Training Workshops The conversation spotlights the profound impact of immersive chicken training workshops. These programs push trainers to adapt, think critically, and make rapid decisions—skills that transfer directly to animal training in any setting. Participants repeatedly describe how the lived experience of practicing these decision-making processes reshapes behavior and builds deeper understanding in ways that theory alone never could.
2. Importance of Adapting Teaching Methods to Individuals Effective instruction in these workshops goes far beyond the animals. Instructors must carefully observe each participant and tailor their approach to match different learning styles. This individualized focus helps trainers unlearn less effective habits and achieve genuine growth through personalized guidance and thoughtful challenge.
3. Building a Supportive Training Community The workshops create a powerful sense of community built on shared breakthroughs, ongoing mentorship, and mutual support. This network encourages continued learning, adaptation, and the preservation of proven training methods for future generations of trainers.
Quick Training Lessons From The Episode
Here are the key takeaways Kirsten wants listeners to carry with them:
1. The true focus of Chicken Workshops is training people. Changing your own behavior is the foundation of effective animal training.
2. Decision-making under pressure is a vital skill. Every session is engineered to sharpen your ability to make quick, thoughtful choices. 3. Real growth requires the willingness to unlearn old habits and embrace new techniques, even when it feels uncomfortable. 4. Hands-on experience and technical skills gained in these workshops cannot be replaced by theory alone. 5. The power of mentorship, community, and collaboration is immense. Being surrounded by dedicated trainers dramatically accelerates learning and positive change.
6. Keeping these training methods accessible for the next generation is essential. The continued evolution of the field depends on it.
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.