You'll enjoy listening to Karen's own podcast (available at the bottom of this page)—audio selections from her latest book, Reaching the Animal Mind.
Fish
Summer Fun
By Karen Pryor on 07/08/2008I've always been interested in play. Science doesn't explain it very well, or it's explained as something young animals do to practice future skills. But that definition doesn't cover every kind of play, and it doesn't explain why it's so much fun, so reinforcing in itself.
Stepping on the Food: A Memo from Karen
By Karen Pryor on 02/19/2008You're training "leave it." You drop a bit of food, the dog lunges toward it, and you cover it with your foot. Are you just managing the environment, or is this negative punishment, taking away something desired?
The Sea Food Circus: Training Fish
By Karen Pryor on 11/01/2007Are fish trainable? And if they are, why bother?
Training a Fish: Goldfish-Click
By Ogden Lindsley on 06/27/2006Note: Ogden Lindsley was one of B.F. Skinners' first graduate students, a past president of the Association for Behavior analysis, and one of the first behavior analysts to grasp the power of shaping with a conditioned reinforcer. As a professor at the University of Kansas, he required his own students to shape behavior; many of them used goldfish. The instructions here for clicker training a goldfish are easy to follow and make a good science project. Karen Pryor
