Karen Pryor once taught a hermit crab to ring a bell by pulling a string with its claw. She taught a cat to play the piano (ham was involved) and, most impressive, her mother to stop complaining on the phone.
Ms. Pryor, whose experience as a dolphin trainer showed her how positive reinforcement could be used to train just about any animal, including horses, dogs, cats and people, died on Jan. 4 at a memory care facility in Santa Clarita, Calif. She was 92.
Her daughter, Gale Pryor, said the cause was dementia.
Ms. Pryor was a naturalist by nature, but she had not planned on a career as a dolphin trainer. She was an English major whose husband, a poet and helicopter pilot turned marine biologist, built the first marine park in Hawaii. Three months before it was set to open in 1964, the dolphins chosen to be the stars had confounded their trainers by not learning the tricks planned for them. Instead, they had taught their exhausted handlers to give them treats for nothing.
The behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner had begun experiments with people and animals in the late 1930s, using positive reinforcement — what he called operant conditioning — as a way to elicit positive behaviors. (He famously taught a rat to spend money and a pair of pigeons to play Ping-Pong.) His principles had informed the nascent field of marine mammal training.
The crew at Sea Life, the Pryors’ soon-to-be-opened park, had been given a manual based on those principles. But the trainers had gotten bogged down in the scientific jargon. So Ms. Pryor took over.
She learned the elegance of the technique, which involves waiting for a desired behavior — jumping, say, or retrieving an object — and then rewarding it with a treat. (That would be a fish, if you’re a dolphin.) She learned about conditioned reinforcers: using a signal — a whistle, a hand movement, a clicker — to herald that a reward was on its way, and then using that signal to refine or shape a behavior or series of behaviors.
Some of the animals she trained began to improvise, like the otter who did marvelous things with a hoop. She had trained it simply to swim through the hoop, but its innovations included lying down on it, swimming backward through it, and catching it on its hind legs and dragging it around. (Otters like to experiment.) When this one displayed its feats before a group of visiting psychologists, they were stunned.
“Amazing,” said one, Ms. Pryor wrote in “Lads Before the Wind: Adventures in Porpoise Training” (1975). “It takes me four years to get graduate students to think like that.”
The creatures at Sea Life Park — an engaging cast of individuals with unique quirks and interests — not only seemed to enjoy their work; they also became skilled teachers themselves, training the humans to communicate with them more effectively. But Ms. Pryor was no sentimentalist, as she told Natalie Angier of The New York Times in 1992:
“Everybody who’s done research in the field is tired of dolphin lovers who believe these creatures are floating hobbits. A dolphin is a healthy social mammal, and it behaves like one, including doing things that we don’t find particularly charming.”
Sea Life Park had been designed as a marine park and a research center overseen by Kenneth Norris, a noted marine mammal expert. Ms. Pryor and her cadre of trainers and dolphins began to participate in studies Dr. Norris was conducting, including for the Navy. They tested the limits of dolphin speed. They measured how deep the dolphins could dive. Years later, as a consultant to the tuna industry along with Dr. Norris, Ms. Pryor offered recommendations for designing nets so dolphins would not be caught in them.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan appointed Ms. Pryor to the Marine Mammal Commission.
The naturalist Konrad Lorenz came to observe the work at Sea Life Park. So did B.F. Skinner, whose daughter, Deborah, stayed on as a trainer. The social scientist Gregory Bateson spent eight years there observing how dolphins communicate.
“Lads Before the Wind,” published in 1975, was Ms. Pryor’s account of her adventures there. But it was her third book — her first was “Nursing Your Baby” (1963), a book on how to nurse humans — that made her name.
“Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training,” first published in 1984, laid out the principles of positive reinforcement. It was both prescriptive and profound.
Ms. Pryor’s cure for her mother’s phone habits involved a practice called extinction. She stayed silent during the recitation of woes. But if her mother stopped ranting to inquire about Ms. Pryor’s children or offer a benign comment, she would respond with enthusiasm. Within weeks, the complaining behavior had been extinguished.
She wrote of how nagging, like other negative reinforcements, only reinforces the nagger’s tendency to nag more; rarely does it elicit any positive reaction in the naggee. This tendency, she noted, becomes more pronounced in more extreme behavior modifications, like beating a child or whipping a horse. Fear will modify the behavior in both creatures. The child or horse will be cowed to obedience, and the punisher will be emboldened to continue his or her corrosive ways.
Positive reinforcement, she wrote, is by contrast a process of give and take: “One becomes more aware of others, and, inevitably, more aware of oneself.”
Karen Liane Wylie was born on May 14, 1932, in Manhattan, the only child of Sally Ondek, a fashion model, and the author Philip Wylie, whose best-selling 1943 essay collection, “Generation of Vipers,” excoriated modern life and included a satirical piece about what he called the cult of mother worship in American society.
Karen grew up in Connecticut and Miami and was a born naturalist — the kind of child, her daughter said, who always had a frog in her pocket. With her father, she learned to snorkel and dive. At Cornell University, she wanted to major in ornithology but was told that women could not be accepted in the program because there was no place for them to go to the bathroom in the woods.
She chose English instead, but she also took every natural history course she could. She kept a fish tank in her sorority, which intrigued a fellow student, a creative writing major named Taylor Allderdice Pryor, known as Tap, who was also ocean obsessed. They married in 1954.
Mr. Pryor enlisted in the Marines, trained to be a helicopter pilot and was posted to Oahu. By then the Pryors had three children and were raising pheasants to pay the bills, and Mr. Pryor had decided to become a marine biologist. He was studying sharks, but there was no place in Hawaii with a tank big enough to keep them. So he decided to build a marine park — a fairly novel idea in the early 1960s, when there were only a few on the mainland — and combine it with a research center.
The Pryors sold Sea Life in 1971 and divorced the next year. In 1983, Ms. Pryor married Jon Lindbergh, a deep sea diver and salmon farmer who was a son of the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh. They divorced in the mid-1990s.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Pryor is survived by two sons, Tedmund and Michael; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
“She was a pioneer in the marine mammal training world,” Ken Ramirez, the former executive vice president of animal care and animal training at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, said in an interview. “In the ’70s, behavioral psychology, or applied behavioral analysis, the science we now use to train marine mammals, was focused on people, children with learning disabilities, autistic children. Karen was an outlier, among a small number of others, who were interested in refining Skinner’s studies and using them for animal training.”
In the decades after “Don’t Shoot the Dog!” was published, Ms. Pryor held workshops for humans, including pilots, fishermen and surgeons, using clickers as signals to help them perform tasks more efficiently. But it was dogs that really took to clicker training. Ms. Pryor didn’t invent the practice, but she helped popularize and refine it, with conferences and an academy for dog trainers.
“So much of dog training is still about dominance,” said Annie Grossman, the author of “How to Train Your Dog With Love and Science” (2024). “It’s how we’re treated, and so we treat our dogs that way. The genius of Karen Pryor is that she showed it doesn’t have to be.”
When Ms. Pryor wrote the first edition of “Don’t Shoot the Dog!” — it is still in print today — she noted that while the term “positive reinforcement” had seeped into the culture, she saw few examples of it being put into practice.
“In fact,” she wrote, “most people don’t understand it, or they would not behave so badly to the people around them.”
