of before.

But I crammed the trailer full.

so that we could have the maximum number of people doing this.

And we were able to get, I think it was 64 people at a time.

And there were two flights that we signed up for and people paid, it was either 50 or $75 a piece.

And it was all going to APDT.

I didn't get anything for this.

If I hadn't known about shaping and known about keeping chickens, data and measuring our progress, which I learned from Bob and Marian, I would have never got there.

Who met Bob first and what decade was that?

Well, I've already heard from Mike that we met, apparently just briefly, sometime late 70s, early 80s.

Later on, we met because Marion and I stopped by Theater of the Sea interviewed them there at Theater of the Sea.

Marion and I had started a program of traveling around the country interviewing people who had some effect, who were influencing the, let's say, the use of psychology on training animals.

And we did this for seven, eight years.

But Shelley and...

Mike, we're early people.

Do you want to add something about working in the Keys, Bob?

Well, I'm not surprised at all, because when someone as generous as you puts themselves out there over and over and over again, it shouldn't be a surprise when people want to pay that favor

back.

Well, he could not believe the conditions under which we traveled, because the ice on the road while we were crossing the Rockies was just fierce.

We saw so many accidents.

And yet we made it across with the chickens, having to stop from time to time to break the ice off of the water container so the chickens could drink and things like that.

Anyway, I gather it was a great trip.

Everybody seemed to be very pleased with it.

I'm taking the quiz on the break.

he really worked with you.

Yeah, I had this really terrible conflict that I had promised Marion on her deathbed that I would continue.

But after she died, I became more and more discouraged and had pretty well decided that there are other things that I could do.

And so I...

I had a number of chats with people, Carolyn included.

And I was gradually convinced to, okay, I'll try.

It won't be the same.

meant

Did you hear that, Bob? There's science geeks out there that love the data.

Well, I'm glad to hear that.

I know that Vicki is in the, let's say, the minority of the world, but it's good that there are people out there who recognize that data properly used, properly gathered and used, can really speed up training and make it much more precise.

And that's one of the things that we try to get across in chicken workshops is

And even though it's hard to explain to people why it's so unique, hopefully after hearing Bob's from a bunch of people, how it changed them, we will attract more.

I should mention here that the workshops have been going on for a number of decades.

We started the workshops in the modern form, the public form, in 1994.

Now, before that, the Breelands and I had been giving workshops to our clients, but we didn't do it publicly.

Did you want to add something about numbers to that, Bob?

I don't know if I ever told Ian about my first and only dog training class that I attended.

I was hired by the Navy, as everybody, I guess, knows, in 62 as the director of training of the program.

So, you know, I had probably the prime experience.

I call it animal training, dolphin training job in the entire world.

Never having trained a dolphin before in my entire life.

I had seen dolphins.

You

And then when Bob said he wanted to come, I was very excited if I can prepare the chickens well enough, but it was okay, I think.

Yes, it all turned out very well.

And I was happy the idea of the chicken workshops grew.

And we actually traveled in Europe to a number of places, giving workshops at a number of places.

And that was fun.

And it also spread the idea.

And Viviana was a very good teacher.

And I hope to spread it good training even more.

That's wonderful.

This, to me, points out a person who has, you could say, innate skills.

It is maybe a demeanor.

It's just an outlook on life is what can I do more? I want to see the mechanism of it.

You know, what is really behind, can I do something else with this? And people who do that sort of thing are very rare.

You don't find them very far.

Most people are very content in a school environment, such as we had there, to just follow instructions.

And that's what they fell back to.

Right.

And it was interesting.

It was a good indoctrination for me about what the future was going to be like.

Karen had already discovered it.

And Terry also.

They were all involved in this new communication on the Internet.

And I was appreciative of that.

Head to Kirsten'sChickenWorkshops.com today.

As a kid

... as a kid.

My first training was out in the middle of the Mojave Desert training coyotes and kangaroo rats and things like that.

And although I had read Skinner, 'cause I'd taken psychology, and I knew about the Brelands, I really didn't know anything about the work they were doing, and frankly, didn't give it all that much thought because as, uh, Phung did, I just looked at the animals and they kind of told me what to do.

Uh, now the systematization really came later on, uh, with the Brelands, uh, when I really had to put my mind to, "How can I really produce the most amount of behavior working with all of these people a- and in the shortest period of time?" And Keller and Marian and, uh, and Kent Burgess and I did a lot of discussion.

But then we can start moving forward because I did begin to systematize, and I began to develop systems, actual systems for training the animals.

But as I said, I felt an, an immediate kinship with Phung because when I saw what he did and listened to him describe what he was doing, I just turned the clock back, you know, like 30, 40 years, and that's what I was doing at first.

Yeah.

How did you learn all that, Bob?

Well, it was just hands-on, I guess.

When I was in the service as an officer that you are instructing men all the time, and there was a number of situations where I had to— teach troops how to do certain things that if they didn't do them right, it would not have been a very glorious ending.

So you got used to teaching people, and I discovered that everybody's different, that one person learns more quickly in one way and another person learns faster in another way.

And as far as the information in the workshop it goes, it's much the same thing.

Every class is different.

The people within the class, they're all different.

Did you know, Bob, when you guys were setting this up, did you purposely set it up or introduce it in such a way that a person is really stressed by the second day? Or did that just happen organically?

So, yeah, I think, Bob, that's the honest story how we met each other.

Well, it's kind of close, I guess.

I did not hang up that many times, a few.

But before we really get started, I wanted to be sure somewhere in this podcast, there is the words that I feel about Simon and his growth.

since we began way back in 96, 97, that he had lots of obstacles.

He wants to describe the obstacles he can, but just know that they were real obstacles to beginning to apply a real science-based technology of dog training in Europe, wherever, that he brought it to his organization.

Whether they wanted it or not was something else again.

You need to have money too.

[laughs]

... on their cooperating on this.

And had we said that that person is not trying or that person is not a good trainer, that, uh, they would've been fired and somebody else would've been brought aboard, and they knew this, so they cooperated.

The point is some of them didn't like it, and, uh, they thought they already knew everything that was needed for them to train.

Well, certain number of people were like that.

Most cooperated, and learned, and their shows got better, and some of them actually began to like that particular, I'm gonna say, kind of training.

They learned that, uh, they should keep records, they learned that there's such a thing as reinforcement and punishment, and all of these really defined, technically defined aspects of training.

And I can say those words, and I believe they will mean very little to you unless you go through exercises that were designed to have you feel that.