ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Automatic Animals: Behaviourist Psychology, Commercial Animal Training, and the Problem of “Misbehaviour”

• In Event: Behavioral Science Beyond the Laboratory: Social Environments, Animal Models, and the Politics of Experimentation

English Abstract

In a 1951 edition of the American Psychologist, Marian and Keller Breland declared themselves founders of a new field of “applied animal psychology.” They had taken B. F. Skinner’s technology of operant conditioning out of the rigidly controlled environment of the laboratory and into the real world. Having worked with Skinner on Project Pigeon for the US Navy in the 1940s, they decided to establish a commercial animal training business that used the efficient and humane methods of the behaviourist psychologist to transform animals into useful and dependable helpers in a wide range of human activities. Their company, Animal Behavior Enterprises Inc. and their amusement park, the IQ Zoo, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, would collaborate with companies and corporations, amusement parks, farms, zoos, laboratories, schools, hospitals, and the US military. They developed new techniques of behaviour “shaping” that would become standard in animal training and help redefine human relationships with non-human organisms. But as successful as they were outside of the laboratory, their work also began to complicate behaviourist psychology within it. As they worked with thousands of animals and dozens of species, they began to focus on problems of animal “misbehaviour” that would challenge and undermine behaviourist theories and draw them closer to ethology. Problems of “misbehaviour” would inspire interdisciplinary research among those determined to view the organism as an independent and autonomous agent and reimagine the relationship between human, animal, technology and society.

Author

• Edmund Ramsden, Queen Mary University of London