Karen Pryor

Karen Pryor

Karen Pryor is a behavioral biologist with an international reputation in two fields, marine mammal biology and behavioral psychology. Karen was a founder of Hawaii’s Sea Life Park, where her work with dolphins pioneered modern, force-free animal training methods. She is the author of Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training, a Bantam bestseller on teaching behavior without coercion, and of Nursing Your Baby, a classic guide for mothers with sales of over 1 million copies. She is also the author of several clicker-training manuals and many scientific papers and popular articles on learning and behavior. Karen Pryor’s newest book is Reaching the Animal Mind: what the clicker training method teaches us about all animals, to be released June 16, 2009, by Scribner and Simon & Schuster in New York.

Karen Pryor is a founder and leading proponent of “clicker training,” a training system based on operant conditioning and the all-positive methods developed by marine mammal trainers. Clicker training and its variation, TAGteaching, for humans, are now in use world wide with dogs, cats, horses, birds, animals in zoos, and increasingly in the teaching of sports, physical therapy, and special needs children.

Pryor’s business background includes co-founding Sea Life Park, the Oceanic Institute, and related commercial enterprises in Hawaii. She has consulted to industry, government agencies, autism schools, and non-profit organizations from 1972 to the present. She is founder and CEO of her own profitable information technology company, KPCT/Sunshine Books, Inc. As CEO Pryor oversees publishing and product development, and hosts two annual conferences on operant training. Pryor and her company have also developed an international trainer-teaching program for dog training instructors with over 100 certified graduates in the US. Karen Pryor served as Commissioner, a presidential appointment, on the federal Marine Mammal Commission, and presently sits on the boards of the Pryor Foundation and the B.F. Skinner Foundation.

For more information about Karen Pryor and clicker training go to www.clickertraining.com and Wikipedia.

 

www.clickertraining.com