Keller B. Breland of Hot Springs, Ark. is a psychologist who applies modern scientific methods to training and understanding animals. The traditional training methods, he believes, are mostly wrong. Punishment and threats work only with such relatively "stupid" animals as horses. Praise is no good except with dogs. For most animals, the best system is an immediate reward of food, given for an action repeated over and over. Even bird-brained chickens and harebrained rabbits can be deeply conditioned by often-repeated rewards.
In 1947 Breland was personnel manager of Streater Industries outside Minneapolis, where he used his psychology on human subjects. He got interested in training animals by psychological methods, and was so successful with hamsters, pigeons, chickens and other unpromising trainees that he found he could sell them, when educated, to General Mills Inc. for use in advertising stunts. In 1947 he quit his human psychology job, and in 1950 he and his wife Marian moved to a farm in Arkansas, where they set up an animal school that has turned out more than 5,000 psychologically educated graduates.
The Dancing Goat. Among the most successful alumni of Breland's university are his "Caseys at the Bat" (hens that play baseball). It takes a very short time, he says, for a hen to learn that when she tugs at a rubber ring, an electrically operated bat will knock a small ball toward a wire-screen outfield and a few grains of wheat will fall into a trough. So the hen pulls the ring, and then runs madly for "first base'' (the trough). If the ball is intercepted by mechanical "defensive players," she knows by experience that she will have to try again, so she hurries back to home plate with visible annoyance and gives the bat another swing.
This performance, which looks intelligent, does not strain the brain of even the flightiest hen. If properly conditioned, she will go through her act in a department-store window, unconscious of traffic noise or applauding spectators. The only thing that matters to her is the reward, and she has been taught what she has to do to get it.
Breland's chickens also count, play poker, shoot popguns and walk on tightropes. Trained in similar mechanical ways are ducks and geese that beat on drums, hamsters that swing on trapezes, goats that dance and highjump, rabbits that kiss each other, pigs that clean up a cluttered room. There seems to be no limit to the tricks that mechanical reward devices can teach to almost any animal. "All we have to do," says Breland, "is to keep the act within the known limitations of the given species."
The Social Dog. Breland thinks that pigs are the most intelligent animals that he has trained. Raccoons, dogs and cats also come high on the list, while horses and cows rank low. But each animal, he says, must be trained in accordance with its peculiar nature. Dogs are not at all typical. By nature they are social animals, living in groups with a rigid code of behavior. They therefore respond to man's praise and affection. Cats do not. They like to be petted, says Breland, but their enjoyment is merely physical. They will do nothing for praise. Most other animals are equally selfish; the dog is about the only one that takes man into his family.