A Short Biography of Bob Bailey A Short Biography of Bob Bailey

I describe myself as a partly-formally trained and partly on-the-job trained behavioral-systems analyst and engineer, small-businessman, field biologist, and teacher. I was born in Ohio and grew up in Los Angeles during WWII, before the rest of the world had discovered what was then idyllic Southern California. My early years were spent trekking the desert looking for animals in the San Fernando Valley, and swimming, surfing, and fishing from Seal Beach to Carpenteria. My father was a precision machinist and ended up working for MGM Motion Picture Studios, so I am a movie brat. I was educated at UCLA (Biology and Chemistry). I was a Teaching and Research Assistant while in college, and I spent a lot of time in the desert and at-sea. Perhaps my greatest claim-to-fame at UCLA was my running down and capturing by hand four kangaroo rats in one night. Catching a wild kangaroo rat by hand at night is a risky athletic feat, and was a sort of rite-of-passage for budding biologists at UCLA, and many spent years before catching one. I became enamored with animal training, including "training" animals, both in the lab and in the wild. I was largely self-taught, and read the writings of B. F. Skinner and Keller and Marian Breland, among others.

My first real job after the military was at the UCLA School of Medicine, researching psychotropic drugs. Leaving UCLA, I worked for short time for California Fish and Game doing at-sea studies. I then became the US Navy Marine Mammal Program's first Director of Training (1962), and was formally introduced the the Breland's and scientific animal training. The Brelands taught several operant conditioning classes using chickens as models. I believe it was a combination of the Brelands' communication skills and the training of the chickens that opened my eyes to what real training was all about. My primary claim to fame at this time probably would be the Navy's first open-ocean release of a dolphin (1964).

Marian and Keller Breland had studied under Skinner until 1944. They left the University of Minnesota and founded Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), the first company to use operant conditioning to train animals. The Brelands were routinely using "clickers" (then, called "crickets") by 1944-1945 for training dogs, cats, parakeets, and other animals. The Brelands, through ABE, was the first to use operant conditioning for training dolphins (1955), whales (1957), parrots (1957), and many other animals. The Brelands had written two landmark scientific papers, both in the American Psychologist - A New Field Of Applied Animal Psychology (1951), and - The Misbehavior Of Organisms (1961). The first paper reported the beginning of scientific animal training, and the second redefined the roles of operant and respondent conditioning in animal training. I joined Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE) in 1965, the year that Keller Breland died. I married Marian Breland 1976. We had already formed a close partnership in the study and training of animals.

Our company, ABE, had more than 43 full time employees, and our business interests were world wide. Over the years ABE behavioral technicians had trained ravens, vultures, pigeons, dogs, cats, dolphins, sea lions, and many other species to perform in difficult circumstances and in free environments. I trained thousands of animals representing over 120 different species. Over the years Marian and I had taught many trainers using as our favorite behavioral model, the barnyard chicken. Marian and I closed-down ABE in 1990, but she continued teaching at Henderson State University, where she had taught psychology classes since 1981.

Marian and I began a historical study of behavioral psychology in 1992, and we began a public version of our operant conditioning workshops using chickens in 1995. WE GAVE OUR FIRST WORKSHOP FOR TERRY RYAN IN 1996. We began our operant conditioning classes in Hot Springs in 1997. Sadly, Marian died in 2001. I continued the classes in Hot Springs until 2004. I continue to teach for others, and to consult with private companies and governmental agencies in the USA and abroad.