Precision Animal Training

About Precision Animal Training

Precision Animal Training is the podcast diving deep into the science and precision of animal behavior modification, hosted by expert trainer Kirsten Kraljevic and pioneering behaviorist Dr. Bob Bailey. Rooted in the legendary Bailey chicken workshops—developed by Bob and Marian Bailey using operant conditioning, positive reinforcement, stimulus control, and razor-sharp timing—this show delivers practical insights on observation, data collection, mechanical skills, and effective training techniques for any species. Through engaging stories, historical lessons from marine mammal programs to chicken camps, and actionable discussions, it empowers trainers of dogs, birds, exotics, and beyond while highlighting how these principles enhance human learning, leadership, communication, and personal development. Ideal for beginners building curiosity-driven skills or seasoned professionals honing precision and timing, Precision Animal Training offers evidence-based wisdom, inspiration, and lifelong learning—proving that mastering training fundamentals, even with a chicken, can transform the way you shape behavior forever.

Publisher

Kirsten Kraljevic

Category

education · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

20 Mar 2026

Latest episode

14 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

25 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Oct 2026

   Prevention Beats Extinction: Smarter Dog Training with Don Hanson

   Kirsten has a way of describing how modern dog training grew up, and it comes in three phases. First the scientific one, when the Brelands' and Baileys' work came through the chicken workshops and the field found out there was a science underneath it. Then the professional one, when it turned out that loving animals is not a business plan. And now the ethical one. Don Hanson (https://www.forcefreepets.com/) has lived all three of them, and because he is a prolific writer, he wrote them down while they were happening. Thirty years of this field's history exists in his archive whether the field asked for it or not. Don met Bob at his first APDT conference in Valley Forge, signed up for a week in Arkansas before he left the building, and went back the following year for the intermediate course. He joins Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey to talk about what actually changed and what stubbornly has not. Along the way: the Orlando conference where sixty-odd famous dog trainers chased chickens up and down the tables and Bob describes it as the greatest thing since the Keystone Cops, the afternoon Bob stood at the podium with what Don calls an elven and satanic grin and told the class to extinguish everything they had just built, the chicken named Fang that Carolyn Clark tamed and one of Don's staff later requested on purpose, and Keller Breland in a bar in 1962, half inebriated and discouraged, because he had won field championships with this method and all anybody wanted to know was where he bought the dog. 3 Key Takeaways 1. Do not reinforce what you do not want. Bob's company ran a five year study on mechanical skills in the 1960s and found that trainer error was the single biggest thing slowing a trainer down. Reinforcing too early, too late, or reinforcing the wrong thing entirely. His mantra came out of that: if you miss a behavior you wanted, fine, it will come around again. Just do not mess up. 2. Prevention beats extinction, and it is not close. This is why Don would rather teach a puppy class than a class full of older dogs. Nobody reinforces the jumping and the biting and the stealing on purpose, but they have usually been doing it for months by the time they call. Extinguishing that costs far more time and energy than never building it. Worse if the behavior you accidentally reinforced is natural for the species. 3. Knowing it and being able to do it are different things, and the field keeps confusing them. Don changed his credentials in 2022 specifically to a body that tests skills as well as knowledge, after being told by other organizations that testing skills is either too hard or not important. His evidence is a cup. Bob spent a morning teaching him how to move one, Don thought it was beneath him, and by lunch it had sunk in. Quick Lessons 1. Curiosity is the trait that separates the people who keep getting better. Bob found it at five years old drawing his finger across a column of ants in Michigan. Don found it in his thirties with a first puppy and no idea what he was doing. 2. If you do not evolve you become obsolete. Don's pet peeve is trainers who resist continuing education. You can get credits online now. He used to drive six hours. 3. Mechanical skills still have to be learned in person, with your hands, ideally with a chicken. Everything else has moved online. That has not. 4. This field moves slowly because people attach their ego to their method. Question how somebody trains and they hear it as an insult to them personally. The Brelands waited twenty years and died waiting. 5. Reach the client before they get the dog. Don offers a free consultation to families who are only thinking about it, and some of them walk out having decided not to yet. That is a good outcome. 6. The dog is teaching you too. Don stopped saying training and started saying teaching. His last dog had his entire staff trained to rub her belly the moment they walked in, and none of them noticed it happening. Resources mentioned Don Hanson's writing, classes and his chronological history of modern animal training: forcefreepets.com (https://www.forcefreepets.com/) Pet Professional Guild (https://www.petprofessionalguild.com/) Pet Professional Accreditation Board (https://www.petprofessionalguild.com/about-ppab/) One more thing October is Bob's birthday month and this one is his 90th. Kirsten is celebrating all month. If you have a story, a message, or something you want played on the show, send it to kirsten@mychickenworkshops.com. Learn about the Chicken Workshops and join the waitlist at kirstenschickenworkshops.com (https://www.kirstenschickenworkshops.com/)

2. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Shelley and Mike Wood On Scaling Animal Training Across Nine Countries

   Mike Wood interviewed Shelley for a job in the Florida Keys on a glass bottom boat. They were both married to other people. Years later, both divorced, he hired her again to come to Mexico, and that is where it turned into a marriage. It is also where two trainers with one dolphin enclosure turned into close to thirty facilities in nine countries with more than two thousand employees. Shelley and Mike join Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey for a conversation that runs from an old Florida mom-and-pop attraction to a backyard beehive. Mike started at Theater of the Sea in 1975 after leaving a farm in Maryland, back when the job was cleaning bathrooms, raking pathways, cutting fish, and doing the show. Shelley came out of the Northwoods of Wisconsin with a biology degree and one goal, which was to work outside and stop being cold. Neither of them set out to train marine mammals. Both of them ended up changing how the industry does it. Along the way: why putting people in the water with dolphins killed punishment overnight, what happens when you promise investors a trained dolphin in three months, and the afternoon Shelley spent watching Bob scuba dive off Cozumel after he casually mentioned his doctor would not approve. 3 Key Takeaways 1. Safety first, then motivation, and never coercion. Shelley's frame for everything under their care: it has to be safe for the animal and for every human near it, and then it has to be fun. Nobody has to do anything. They participate because the consequence is worth participating for. That is not a soft position. It is the only thing that works when a stranger is in the water with your dolphin. 2. Teaching is a different skill than doing, and knowing it is not the same as being able to hand it over. Shelley could handle the animals and she could coach people, and she still could not teach. Her words. That gap is what sent her to Bob, over and over, by phone and email, sometimes twice on the same question. Once you are teaching, you have to understand the science at a level you never needed when you were only applying it. 3. The science is already done. Your job is to adapt it, not reinvent it. What gets tweaked is the application across species and environments, and that is where the trainer's experience lives. Everything underneath it has been settled for decades, which is exactly why it scales. Quick Lessons 1. The old model was secrecy. If you knew how to train well, you guarded it, because that was your job security. There was no science in it, just whatever your mentor did. 2. Putting humans in the water changed the method overnight. Negative reinforcement and punishment were both on the table in Mike's early years. Neither survives a swim program. 3. If it is not repeatable, it does not survive growth. Two trainers can stay consistent by talking to each other. Two thousand employees across nine countries and multiple languages cannot. 4. Go to the source. With plenty of resources available in the marine mammal world, they went to the science itself instead, and Shelley calls it the best choice they ever made. 5. Hire for the whole job, not the fantasy of it. Plenty of people wanted to play with dolphins. Mike hired the ones who could take the heat, the hours, and the bathrooms. 6. The principles travel. Mike solved a neighbor's bee problem by dipping water out of their pool, setting up stations beside it, and walking those stations back onto his own property. Same craft, smaller animal. Resources mentioned Shelley Wood: shelleywood6@gmail.com One more thing October is Bob's birthday month and this one is his 90th. Kirsten is celebrating all month. Send a story, a message, or something to play on the show to kirsten@mychickenworkshops.com. The Team Bob dolphin shirt is on her website.

3. 

   1 Oct 2026

   Three Skill Sets: Veronica Boutelle on Training, Teaching and Business

   Bob Bailey has been watching this field for sixty or seventy years, and I have been watching it with him, and his verdict is blunt. More dog businesses have failed on the business end than on the dog training end. Veronica Boutelle watched the same thing happen from the other side. She was Director of Behavior and Training at the San Francisco SPCA, where Jean Donaldson's Academy for Dog Trainers ran out of her department, and she would check in with graduates a year later and find them back in the careers they had tried to escape, or picking up part-time work to make rent. Not because they could not train. Because nobody had taught them how to run the thing. So she built it. Veronica and founding partner Gina Phairas launched dogbiz (https://dogbizsuccess.com/) in late 2003 and are coming up on twenty-five years of teaching trainers the part that keeps the lights on. In this conversation Veronica tells Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey how the SF SPCA brought Chicken Camp to San Francisco by selling tickets to local trainers to cover it, how Bob flew out to headline her grand opening with a night of newly declassified government stories and the raven cameras, and how COVID turned a hastily built free six week program called Survive and Thrive into two thousand trainers from around the world and then into Thrive, the group coaching program still running today. She also says the thing most positive reinforcement trainers need to hear about their rates, and it is not comfortable. 3 Key Takeaways 1. You are running three businesses at once, whether you know it or not. Training animals is one skill set. Coaching the humans who live with the animal is a second, and if you do not change the person's behavior nothing you do with the dog sticks. Running the business is a third. Most trainers invest continuing education in the first one only. 2. Business is a learnable skill set, not a personality trait. By Veronica's count, ten percent or fewer of positive reinforcement trainers come into this naturally entrepreneurial. The rest arrive loving dogs, discover there are no jobs, and realize they have to own something. In her words, these skills are as learnable as the four quadrants, and twenty-five years of watching terrified trainers turn confident is the proof. 3. Your low rate is a message, and it is not the one you think. Positive reinforcement trainers undervalue themselves out of ethics and guilt, then cannot understand why the client went to a shock jock first. Veronica's answer: because you charged half the price, so they assumed you were not as good, and your marketing never suggested change was possible. Not guaranteeing outcomes is not the same as refusing to say you can help. Quick Lessons 1. Put your own mask on first. If you want to help the most dogs over the longest career, the business has to be financially sustainable. It is very hard to make good decisions under financial stress. 2. Stop running it as a hobby business. A professional service business and a deep love of dogs are not in conflict. Altruism and an entrepreneurial mindset can live in the same person. 3. Social media is the wrong first basket. A brand new business putting all its marketing there is mostly marketing to friends and family. Build the audience before you count on it. 4. Inconsistent marketing is why the cycle repeats. Most trainers market hard when they are desperate, get comfortable, take their foot off the gas, and drop again. 5. Community beats competition. When trainers stopped treating each other as competitors, progress on individual businesses got bigger and faster. 6. Continuing education counts in all three areas. Trainers go back to Chicken Camp more than once because they are a different trainer each time. Business works the same Resources mentioned dogbizsuccess.com (https://dogbizsuccess.com/) dogbizsuccess.com/thrive (https://dogbizsuccess.com/thrive/) Business Success Snapshot, free, under three minutes: quiz.dogbizsuccess.com (https://quiz.dogbizsuccess.com/) One More Thing October is Bob's birthday month, and this one is his 90th. Kirsten is celebrating all month. If you have a story, a message, or something you want recorded and played on the show, email kirsten@mychickenworkshops.com.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

6 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

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