Greta Kaplan, CPDT
Of all the education I’ve experienced in becoming and being a dog trainer, the one that stands out most is what’s known as “Chicken Camp.” More properly called “Cross-Species Operant Conditioning Training Workshop” (you can see why people prefer to call it Chicken Camp), this workshop teaches advanced, high-quality clicker training skills to the human students. The training subjects are chickens: all hens, in fact. Each student works with one naive bird, who’s only been working Chicken Camp for 1-2 years, and one experienced bird who may have 6 or 8 years of Camp under her feathers. Chicken Camp’s format evolved over the dozen-plus years of its existence, and the four sessions I took (the complete curriculum) were Discrimination, Cueing and Criteria, Chaining, and Teaching Operant Conditioning. Instructor Bob Bailey has also given shorter, more condensed workshops at other locations.
Bob Bailey (and, before their respective deaths, Marian Breland Bailey and Keller Breland) spent many decades operating Animal Behavior Enterprises, a company originally started in the 1940s with the crazy [Read more...]
