Professional Documents
Culture Documents
country. She also appeared on television. She are shipped out with the chicks and provide the
was even more successful than the chicken acts at only necessary instruction. This act has been a
jamming fair booths and feed-stores with specta- perennial favorite and we have trained more than
tors. The pig act was in use almost steadily from 2,500 chicks to fill orders for this display.
the fall of 1948 to the summer of 1950. It was We have developed two variations on the baby
necessary to train a replacement about every 3 to chick act. One uses a projector to present adver-
5 months, since the pigs rapidly became too large tising copy, with an endless chain of baby chicks
for easy shipping. After training, the pigs were in motion around it. The other variation substi-
turned over to their handler, usually a General tutes for the ramp a series of steps onto which the
Mills' feed salesman, who had had one or two days' chicks must jump.
instruction at our farm, or in the field under our A calf was trained for the General Mills' booth
supervision. at the International Dairy Exposition at Indianapo-
In addition to teaching handlers to manage the lis. "Larro Larry" took part in a quiz program by
animals on the road, we have twice taught instruc- lighting up "Yes" and "No" signs, as did Priscilla
tors to do the basic training of the animals and the Pig, and played "Bull in the China Shop" by
assist with the instruction of the handlers. Both systematically upsetting an elaborate display of
experiences in training instructors were successful dishes, to the great alarm of the passing crowd.
and demonstrated clearly that people with no A turkey act has been developed in which mem-
special psychological background can learn the bers of the audience play a game with the turkey.
methods and theory behind our animal training The bird is placed in a display case and has access
procedures. One instructor was a woman college through an opening to part of the miniature play-
graduate who had taken her degree in statistics ing field. The turkey is trained to rake a steel ball
and sociology. The other was an average male off this field into his goal. The audience player is
high school graduate, whose only specialty had given a long pole with a magnet on one end and
been radio repair work. Both acquired in a few tries to guide the ball along the playing field into
weeks most of the techniques of training the ex- his goal before the turkey wins. Various barriers
isting acts, and enough of the theory and nature are placed along the playing field to make_the game
of the process to train new acts on their own. more difficult for both players.
Our next development was a baby chick act. Additional acts using grown chickens have been
Sixty to 100 chicks are trained for one show. Be- designed and used, two involving discrimination
ginning at about one week of age, they are trained problems: the Card Sharp, who picks out a better
for about 10 days. The show is run with about 10 poker hand than a member of the audience, and the
or 12 chicks on stage. Each runs up a ramp or in- Old Shell Game, in which the chicken picks out the
clined plane to a platform from which he can reach shell with the bean under it; and two contests be-
a feed hopper. He "roots" the top chick off, grabs tween two birds, a High Jump contest, and a
a bite of feed, then in turn gets pushed off by the Strength of Pull test. Another automatic act was
next in line. As he goes, he falls onto a tilting pan created by training a hen, on a very high fixed
and is deposited onto the stage floor, accompanied ratio, to beat a toy drum for hours at a time. We
by the sounding of a chime and flashing of a trade also trained a hen in some bizarre contortions; the
name sign. This sequence of behavior results in hen twisted her neck to one side and over her back
an | endless chain of baby chicks running up the so that she appeared to be looking frantically in
ramp and sliding off. When the group becomes all directions at once. This was billed as "The
sleepy, they are replaced by a fresh batch, and the Civilian Aircraft Spotter" or "The Atom Bomb
show can thus go on indefinitely; it has actually Neurosis." We have done a few experiments and
been used about 12 hours a day in most cases. some developmental work on rats, hamsters, guinea
This act is our first "packaged act." It is de- pigs, ducks, pigeons, rabbits, cats, dogs, and crows.
signed to run virtually automatically. It requires There are, obviously, innumerable other possi-
only the attendant to keep the feed hopper full bilities in the field of advertising exhibits. One is
and change the group of chicks on stage when the perfection of the "packaged act," the fully auto-
they become sleepy. No special training is re- matic unit which can be shipped anywhere, set up
quired for the attendant; mimeographed directions in a store window or convention booth, and oper-
204 THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
ated day in and day out with no more instructions thought of. More psychologists, grounded in the
than are necessary for the operation of any ma- theory, are needed to advance the technology and
chine designed for such use. One adaptation of the explore the undeveloped portions of this program.
automatic act is the animated display—show win- Furthermore, once the technology gets under way
dow advertising in which live animals take the and the business develops, there will be active need
place of puppets and robots. for academic psychologists to do the background
However, probably the biggest applications exist research necessary for full development of the pro-
in the entertainment world. Here we can take over gram. And, of course, as psychologists continue to
the formal animal training involved in the standard do basic research using animals as subjects, one
animal act for stage, circus, and movies, and do it by-product will be new and better methods of ap-
faster, cheaper, better, and in multiple units. It plied animal psychology.
is possible to create new acts, whole new circuses, Two types of problems have cropped up repeat-
in fact, using unusual animals and unusual acts, edly in our efforts. (1) Apparatus problems have
and again do it cheaply, quickly, and in numbers consumed much more time than problems con-
limited only by time and production facilities. Tel- nected with the behavior. The apparatus must be
evision offers unusual opportunities. We can in- suited to the physique of the particular animal,
vade the field of night-club entertainment with must be durable enough to stand ,up under cross-
novel small animals. We can sell or rent trained country shipment, and must be foolproof enough
animal units to hospitals, doctors' offices, waiting to be operated by relatively untrained personnel.
rooms of various sorts, or even to private indi- (2) We need to know the answers to various "aca-
viduals, supplying instructions on care and mainte- demic" problems, such as "What sort of fixed ratio
nance. will an animal sustain on a response made to a
Another important application of animal psy- disappearing manipulandum, a key available, for
chology is the training of farm animals. Farm dogs example, only every three minutes?" "What would
and horses could be rendered much more useful to constitute an adequate reinforcement for a hamster,
the average farmer if they were given appropriate to sustain performances over several hours without
training. Farmers could themselves be instructed satiation?" "What are the emotional character-
in training and handling their own animals. istics of rabbits and guinea pigs—to what sort and
The training of dogs for the blind could prob- magnitude of stimuli will they adapt, and what is
ably be done on a larger scale, more rapidly and the nature of the curve of recovery from such an
efficiently. One of the big problems of the "Seeing adaptation?"
Eye" institution was obtaining instructors. The The study of these and related questions—in
difficulty was, apparently, that the first masters of short, the re-examination of the whole field of com-
the art did not have a sufficiently precise theoreti- parative psychology in this new light—by psycholo-
cal formulation in training the dogs and hence could gists who have available the facilities of an animal
not pass the information on to new instructors. laboratory, would greatly speed up the development
They then encountered another problem in instruct- of the applied field.
ing the blind to handle the dogs and met numerous In conclusion, we feel that here is a genuine field
failures here in adapting client to dog. Many of of applied psychology, old as "group living" and
these failures could now doubtless be avoided. "parenthood" in its subject matter, but new in
Dogs, of course, can be trained more readily with method and approach, which psychologists can en-
the new methods in all the traditional fields of ter with promise of financial reward and a sense of
canine service to mankind: hunting, guarding chil- accomplishment and ultimate benefit to the science.
dren and property, and detective work. Military For we all know that there is nothing as convincing
use of dogs in such tasks as guard duty and carry- to the layman of the worth of a discipline as
ing messages can also be made more effective. achievement, and the present field offers the psy-
This, then, seems to be the general outline of a chologist a fine opportunity to demonstrate control
promising new field which we have only begun to of his subject matter.
explore. It is so vast, we feel, that we cannot be-
gin to develop one-tenth of the projects we have Manuscript received March 26, 1951