Karen Pryor Biography

About Karen Pryor, horses and a clker method published: your comment will be the first Karen Pryor Karen Pryor-the name known in the circles of trainers and experts in animal behavior. She is a biologist, scientist, specialist in behavioral psychology and training of marine mammals. And she is the writer-the author of more than 50 scientific works and articles on popular science topics, she also wrote five books that have withstood more than one edition and are popular far beyond the borders of her homeland.

Karen was born in the year in New York in the family of an American writer-naturalist Philip Wiley. From childhood, animals surrounded her and she really loved to watch them. Surely, not without the influence of her father, she learned to intuitively understand animals and quickly find a common language with them. She devoted her whole subsequent life to the animals - the study of their image of thinking and the formation of their behavior desired for people.

Different animals went through her life - both home and exotic. There were horses among them. In her youth, Karen went to a local riding school, where she spent almost all her pocket money. After some time, she already raised her own Wales pony. Once she bought a mare with a foal. The foal was called an echo. While the mare was already an experienced and trained animal, her foal had only to teach everything.

On it, Karen had to work out the skills of training horses. Over time, the echo was used to the halter, clearing hooves and other things that should be known to the educated horse. Unfortunately, when the echo grew up, it turned out that he could hardly lend itself to traditional arrival. Local coaches, who were invited for his training, were in a hurry to take up the scourge and hold the young stallion in severity.

Of course, this did not like this, and he behaved too obscurely in order to decide to roll children on it. Pony had to sell. Even later, Karen taught children riding for some time and even trained horses for her neighbors. She trained horses with those methods that were adopted in her environment. These are traditional methods that are based on what is called “negative reinforcement” in psychology.

With the help of a bridle, whip and spurs on the horse have an unpleasant effect that it can stop if it performs the action desired for the coach. Everything changed when, in the 10ths of the last century, Karen Pryor began working with whaling in the oceanarium. Do not wear bridle on a dolphin or killer whale, they cannot be obtained with a whip. But the animal in the pool, as expected, should perform complex tricks on its own simply at the command of the trainer.

Often animals should work in the group as a well -coordinated team. It was decided to use a positive reinforcement when the animal received a reward for the actions needed by the trainer. Then it turned out that this method has many restrictions in the training of dolphins and it was improved by the use of a whistle. When the dolphin performed the desired action, the trainer whistled.

The whistle meant that the dolphin did what he needed and earned the award that he would receive when he swam to the trainer. The advantage of this method is that he allowed to reinforce complex behavior when the trainer was not next to the animal, or when the trainer could not encourage the correct action immediately at the time of its commission. For dogs and horses, in similar cases, a device emitting clicks is used.

Hence the method and was called the Clique Method. These books are not only a wonderful manual for everyone who is engaged in training and education, they contain a lot of entertaining and instructive stories and reflection of the author. Karen discovered that the clicker method is universal. It allows you to train not only dolphins, but also any other animal that can respond to stimuli: a dog, a person, a horse, fish, even a mollusk.

A pleasant surprise was that the animals trained in this way behaved more freely and relaxed and felt more comfortable than those in the upbringing of which they used force. At one of the animal training conferences, Karen Pryor shared her impressions of horses trained in a positive reinforcement. According to her, the expression of the muzzle, and posture, and movements, and the entire condition of such horses radically different from horses brought up by other methods.

Probably, it is applied the method of positive reinforcement to his first pony, his training would be much more successful.

Now the clker-method in raising horses is used by the famous coach Alexander Kurland. She achieves amazing successes and shares her experience with all the interviews with Alexandra, read soon in the equestrian online magazine Equilife. Currently, Karen Pryor lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She has three children, seven grandchildren, two dogs and a cat. Even now, she did not move away and despite her age 84 years continues what she has done all her life.She has created and now supports the Academy Karen Pryor, as well as a site dedicated to the cliqueur method, where she answers the questions of his followers.

It rarely trains animals itself, but actively in a word and example helps everyone who is interested in her method of non -violent training. Good article? Tell friends!