Part of my training included spending nearly two weeks learning how to train chickens with Bob Bailey and Terry Ryan. Why? We’ll get to that later. first, a video I made of me training chickens in 2008. Rather, me being trained how to train chickens.

This video shows a day at chicken training camp, compressed to six minutes. I am training in the upper right corner.

This day we were working on cues and discrimination training. In one exercise, we were training a chicken to peck a circle only when a red laser dot was shone below it. In the other exercise, we were training a chicken to to in an oval (around two inverted flower pots) or figure eight (around two traffic cones). Ask for details about how we did it. The figure eight exercise required training the chicken from the end of an eight-foot table.

We trained two chickens in 30-60 second sessions, alternating birds, coaching our partner between our own bird sessions, and listened to lectures by Bob Bailey, a founder of Animal behavior Enterprises, and married to one of B.F. Skinner’s graduate students, Miriam Brelend Bailey.

Chicken training is used to train police dog trainers in Europe, and to help interested people understand the basic principles of ABA. It has been used to help build teams in corporations. If you can train a chicken, you can clean your mental palate long enough to focuse on theory and forget what the bird is thinking. Think behaviorally, not humanistically, I’ve always said. In between carting around the chickens (rather like carrying a football), we recieved lectures from Bob Bailey, who has trained 160 species of animals.

As an instructor at the SFSPCA Academy for Dog Trainers, I used Chicken Training to teach my adult students ABA theory. Here I am in my own clip of teaching chicken training camp.