Karen Pryor's Legacy

Jan 5, 2025

S&W: We honor Karen Pryor's legacy. We are eternally grateful for her various important contributions to our world! Her work positively altered the lives of countless people & animals. Thank you isn't enough.

An excerpt from below: "she brought positive reinforcement (clicker) training to the dog and zoo worlds, gave confidence to hundreds of thousands of breast-feeding women, developed techniques for teaching people with autism, and changed how surgeons learn their skills which in turn creates less stressful and more error-free operation rooms.

The common thread through all of her work is how she effectively reduces gratuitous violence and creates a culture that is productive, yet filled with kindness."

From the Karen Pryor website:

Karen Pryor had many interests. She was an observer of the smallest detail (as a child she studied butterfly anatomy) but what made her life’s work exceptional was that she also saw the big picture. It would have been enough that Karen was one of the first marine mammal trainers who used behavior science and positive reinforcement, but she took that experience and turned it into a culture-changing perspective on animal behavior, communication between species, and humanity. We are all fortunate that Karen was an effective and engaging writer, making her observations accessible to readers worldwide.

She initially learned about behavior theory as a pioneering dolphin trainer in the 1960s. But early on she had mentors from fields that rarely intersected, such as behaviorist B. F. Skinner and ethologist Konrad Lorenz. Karen has said: “I consider my gifts as a scientist to be the ability to synthesize apparently opposing fields of thought and to apply theory in the real world.”

In the real world, using her perspective, she brought positive reinforcement (clicker) training to the dog and zoo worlds, gave confidence to hundreds of thousands of breast-feeding women, developed techniques for teaching people with autism, and changed how surgeons learn their skills which in turn creates less stressful and more error-free operation rooms. The common thread through all of her work is how she effectively reduces gratuitous violence and creates a culture that is productive, yet filled with kindness.

Her daughter Gale recently wrote a wonderful article about Karen.

Karen Wylie Pryor passed away January 4, 2025 at age 92.