About Us
Hello, I’m Kirsten Kraljevic.
I’m a lifelong student of animal behavior, with more than three decades of professional dog training experience and a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
In 2002, I attended all five of Bob Bailey’s Chicken Workshops. They changed how I understood training. Behavior is lawful: the same principles apply across species. Our job is to observe carefully, build our mechanical skills, and change our own behavior to help the learner succeed.
Bob also showed me what good teaching makes possible. His workshops gave me room to experiment, learn from mistakes, and challenge myself. That experience shaped the learning environment I work to create today.
My husband and I built My Chicken Workshop in Mobile, Alabama, to keep this practical education available. Chickens give us immediate feedback on our timing, criteria, and reinforcement. Working with them helps us become more thoughtful, precise trainers of any species.
I also co-host Precision Animal Training with Dr. Bob Bailey, exploring the history and practice of animal training through conversations with the people who helped shape it.
My work continues a teaching tradition developed by Keller and Marian Breland and Bob Bailey. I want to keep that knowledge in practice—and help the next generation build on it.
Brelands and the Baileys
“If you reinforce a behavior, it’s more likely to occur again. If you don’t reinforce it, it’s less likely to occur again. Animals are learning all the time, not just during training sessions. And they’re learning with the same principles, and Operant Conditioning is the way that behavior changes in the real world.” Marian Breland Bailey
Keller and Marian Breland-Bailey, both of whom were students of B.F. Skinner started Animal Behavior Enterprises in 1947. ABE was a commercial company that the Brelands used as proof of concept of the scientifically based method they first learned of from Skinner. After Keller died in 1965, Marian continued to run ABE for 47 years remarrying in 1975 to Dr. Bob Bailey, a former student of Keller and Marian’s and the first head of the Navy Dolphin Training Program.
Using 5 proven principles of Operant Conditioning, ABE humanely trained over 15,000 animals of 140 different species for entertainment, corporations, and government agencies, as well as consulting with numerous zoos, oceanaria, and amusement parks, ultimately spreading their knowledge of animal training internationally. Robert E. Bailey of Animal Behavior Enterprises and J. Arthur Gillaspy, Jr. Of the University of Central Arkansas wrote in their paper, published in The Behavior Analyst 2005, 28, 143-159 NO. 2 (Fall)
We could find no evidence of animal trainers intentionally using Operant Conditioning in commerce before the Brelands. Their training methods were based on Skinner’s observations in the laboratory, and they continued to refine and adapt their practices for use in the field by relatively unskilled personnel working with a variety of species. Perhaps their most notable refinement was the prominent and precise use of a secondary reinforcer (whistle or click ) as a stimulus for, or a time bridge leading to, the upcoming delivery of a primary reinforcer (food). In the mid-1940s, the Brelands coined the term bridging stimulus to refer to the reinforcer.
The bridging stimulus enabled ABE trainers to control behavior in settings where immediate access to a primary reinforcer was impractical.
The Brelands and the Baileys taught this technology to thousands of animal trainers, starting them on chickens. By the ‘90s they began offering chicken workshops to the general public. Bob continued offering the workshops after Marian’s death in 2001, officially retiring from teaching them full-time in 2016.
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