Today, many animal lovers and horse trainers alike employ clicker training with their horses. They use this strategy to help train their horses better and faster. Like humans, animals such as horses also need some reliable trainings and one way of achieving such is through clicker trainings. But how did this idea came to be? To know the history of clicker training, read further on the article below.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner, was an American psychologist. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. He is the person who came up with the operant conditioning chamber and founded his own school of experimental research psychology, the experimental analysis of behavior.

Operant conditioning is the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. It deals with the modification of operant behavior.

His two first students, Marian Kruse and Keller Breland saw the possibilities for animal training as a business. Hence, clicker training came when these two students trained pigeons to be used during wars when they participated in military research during World War II.

When they left the B.F Skinner School, they formed the first company that used operant conditioning which was known as the Animal Behavior Enterprises or ABE. The said institute trained the first free-flying bird shows and served as a host of commercial animal exhibits.

In 1955, Keller and Marian opened IQ Zoo that featured a showcase of animals. This center has become a training ground for animals and also served as a training facility in itself. The popularity of the IQ Zoo brought Keller and Marian to the mainstream and they also grabbed the attention of the major commercial animal training industries. In the 1950s, they developed the first ever operant-based marine mammal and bird shows for Marineland of the Pacific, Marine Studios, and Parrot Jungle.

Bob Bailey was the US Navy’s first Director of Training and later got married to Marian. Together, they continued their work at ABE when Keller Breland died in 1965. They then created the so-called radio-carrying cats, as well as, dolphins that are able to locate targets from many miles away. Likewise, they also devised ravens and other birds that are equipped with intricate cameras, which were directed by lasers. Gulls, who are expert sea searchers by nature, could now effectively locate and report missing life rafts and swimmers who were swept away far offshore. In a similar manner, the facility was later used to train at least 140 different species of animals including whales, bears, lions and domesticated dogs or cats and even humans beings.

The clicker is only used to train and acquire a new behavior. A clicker is just one example of a conditioned reinforcer. In this sense, any other sensory mode can become a conditioned reinforcer. Nevertheless, the animal training programs at most major theme parks and oceanariums today can be traced back to Keller and Marian Breland’s efforts.