How tic-tac-toe-playing chickens changed my life (and your dog’s too)

A couple of blocks from where I grew up in Manhattan’s Chinatown, there’s a gaming arcade called Chinatown Fair. My parents were divorced, but in the 1980s and ’90s, on special occasions, we would take a trip à trois to the rather dingy (and super ding-y) Mott Street arcade. We weren’t there to play pinball or Ms. Pac-Man, however. We went to see a chicken play tic-tac-toe.

It cost 50 cents to challenge the chicken, who stood in a clear box that had backlit red Xs and Os on a hashtag board, maybe a foot high. Once your coins plunked in, the chicken—a real, live hen—would go to a control board behind an opaque panel to peck her first move. Then you’d put in yours, pressing a button to indicate your choice. The chicken always won. If you were lucky, you might get a draw. (If you were really lucky, she would lay an egg.)

I’d ask my dad how it was done. “She’s a smart chicken,” he’d say.

Later, over a plate of General Tso’s, he’d look down and say, “This chicken was less smart.”

A few pinball machines over, a different chicken would step up on a platform in her clear box and do a little dance when you paid. The world’s purest peep show!

My dad was able to explain this one with more clarity. The plate she danced on, he said, was giving her electric shocks, which made the chicken look like she was dancing.

That seemed reasonable—inhumane, but reasonable. But the one who played tic-tac-toe was a mystery. The people who ran the arcade weren’t going to tell. Google didn’t exist yet. Even my dad didn’t know.

Fast-forward 30 years, to a converted warehouse in a Boston suburb where I’m attending my first “Chicken Camp.” I’m a recovering print journalist in the process of learning how to be a dog trainer. I had been trying to find a career that wasn’t going to require me to tweet all day, and my search—and Amos, my very good Yorkiepoo—had led me to a program about how to be skilled clicker trainers. 

Clicker training, as the name suggests, is named for a keychain-size mechanical device that makes a rapid click sound. Trainers use them to precisely pinpoint a desired behavior and then immediately reinforce it—for instance, by offering the animal a treat. Animal trainers call this positive reinforcement. Once I realized how effective it was at training dogs, I was itching to see what else I could do with the nifty little gadget. 

“Do they need your help?” one friend asked when I said I was heading up to “Chicken Camp.” “Or are they being bad?” 

Nope—we were simply training the chickens to peck a laminated card that was a certain shape or color. But what exactly I was trying to teach them didn’t matter: I was the student, learning how to create a training plan, pinpoint behaviors, give treats effectively, and determine if and when I should reward a given type of peck.  

In some ways, training a chicken is like swinging with a weighted bat. If you can train this flighty animal that has no interest in your affection or attention and would like to just not be killed, you’ll look with fresh eyes upon training the Chihuahua who’s dying to snuggle in your lap.

In other ways, chicken training is much simpler than dog training, clearing away a lot of the emotional and cultural static that surrounds everything about dogs. There’s no cuddling on the couch afterward. I also had total control over pretty much the only thing the chickens cared about: food. We have less control over all the things our dogs want.

Bob Bailey, who started the program, has trained more than 10,000 individual animals and more than 100 species, almost entirely using positive reinforcement. But it was Parvene Farhoody who was running the clinic I attended. She had studied the art and science of chicken training with Bailey himself and developed the latest version of this workshop with him. 

I told her about the Mott Street birds and she nodded. “Those were Bob’s.”

I was, for a moment, speechless. The last thing I expected when I arrived at this Massachusetts warehouse was to solve the mystery of the tic-tac-toe chicken.

When I flashed back to the present—where I was surrounded by people teaching color differentiation to hens—I told Farhoody about my dad’s explanation of how the chickens were made to dance using electric shocks.

“You can’t force a chicken to do that,” she said. “You have to use positive reinforcement.”

A Virtuous Cycle

Up until then, when it came to dogs, I had generally muddled through with a mix of intuition, good intentions, and emotional reactions. I looked for advice where I could find it, and was happy to ingest folk wisdom and pseudoscience, never realizing that’s what it was. I bit my puppy’s ear like a mother dog would because my dad once heard someone on the BBC suggest that was how to curb nipping. On the National Geographic channel, I gathered from Cesar Millan that my dog’s issues were really my issues, and that I should try to emulate Oprah. Also: It’s important to not let the dog walk out the door first. 

But as I would come to realize, too often, dogs trained with baseless theories and crude techniques centered on punishment and “dominance” can end up stressed, which stresses out their people. This can result in ruined relationships, maimed people, and euthanized dogs. 

I had understood “positive reinforcement” dog training basically as just being nice to dogs. But I came to understand that there was a lot more to it—and that I knew a lot about it before I knew what it was called. It was why I did things I enjoyed, hung out with friends I liked, tried to find work I liked. Life was basically an effort to do the things I liked—and more of them. My behavior was being molded by positive reinforcement all the time, though I didn’t call it that.

If a behavior is positively reinforced, it means that something desirable was added to the situation as a result of that behavior—the positive part—and the likelihood that this behavior will reoccur has been encouraged—the reinforcement part. Behaviors may be reinforced with attention or affection or food, or with any number of signs or sounds that have taken on meaning thanks to repeated meaningful pairings through what’s called classical conditioning. (Think of Pavlov’s dogs and their buzzer.)

Once you realize how it’s possible to reinforce behaviors you want—once you see the enthusiasm with which a dog in training will participate in the process—you might end up shaking your fist at a society where we are so controlled by mandates and fines, coercion and force.

This kind of all-carrot-no-stick approach might sound like it’d produce anarchist brats, but good dog trainers know that shaping behavior using a reward-based system can create reliable, predictable habits and interactions that the learner is excited to have in their repertoire. Once we understand the science, the only limitations dog trainers will have are their own skill set and willingness to practice. Plus, of course, the dog’s physical abilities.

Reward the behaviors you like, and you’ll get more of those behaviors. Can it all really be so simple? Roughly speaking, yes.

But it’s not easy.

The Amazing Brelands and Baileys

Bob Bailey is fond of pointing this out: “Training is simple but not easy.” It can take time, patience, and ingenuity to train an animal. But much of it comes down to creating opportunities for behaviors you like to happen, then rewarding those behaviors. Over and over. “Reinforce often, especially early in training,” he writes on his website.

Bailey’s approach feels like a guide to navigating many relationships in life where we’re trying to encourage certain behaviors, whether we’re working with dogs, chickens, parents, children, employers, employees—even partners or spouses. I mean, is there any relationship that we care about in which we wouldn’t like to have some influence?

Bailey is in his late eighties and lives in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He’s on my screen, wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt with dolphins on it. When I ask him what he’s proudest of, he tells me his marriage—he has been a widower since 2001—and his three sets of twins. This is sincere and sweet, but takes me by surprise, because I thought he would say something like “training a dolphin to find sea mines or rescue military gear.” In the early ’60s, Bailey became the first director of training for the U.S. Navy’s pioneering marine mammal program.

When his wife, a groundbreaking and influential trainer—both a mentor and a partner to him—was asked a similar question in a 1992 interview, I figured she’d talk about her considerable contributions to developing and refining the ways in which a variety of species of animals could be trained. Over the course of more than five decades, she trained everyone from killer whales to cockroaches. 

But she too gave an answer that surprised me. “Our biggest contribution,” she said, “was training people.”

Her name was Marian Breland Bailey, and when she says “our” in that clip, she isn’t referring to herself and her husband; she’s referring to herself and her husbands. 

She was widowed in 1965, the same year Bob Bailey began working for her. They married in 1976. He grew up in Van Nuys, California, and studied biochemistry at UCLA. “My idea of a trainer was a guy with a whip, a chair, and a gun in a lion cage,” he tells me. But that had changed by the time he met Marian Breland. 

As an undergraduate, Marian had taken a psychology class taught by a 35-year-old B.F. Skinner. What she learned from Skinner’s experiments in operant conditioning—shaping behavior with reinforcement—would change the path of her life. She married a fellow grad student, Keller Breland, who had a similar passion for what Skinner was teaching. 

His reward-learning research would also have lasting implications for the whole field of psychology, animal and human; later, the concepts of his Skinner Box would show up in, among other places, the addictive designs of social media platforms. The Brelands decided that they would use what they’d learned in Skinner’s lab to set up a business training animals. They called their company Animal Behavior Enterprises, and by 1947 they had remote-operated feeders and a staff of trainers conditioning animals by the dozen. 

“The Brelands had the idea that they could mass-produce behavior,” Bailey explains to me. “If they controlled the contingencies, if they controlled the environmental conditions, if they prepared the animal, if they adapted the animal to what they were going to experience out there, they could produce hundreds of animals.” 

This sounds nefarious, until you realize that much of what they ended up doing involved dressing up chickens and ducks who would perform amusing—or astounding—tasks in enclosed displays at roadside attractions and amusement parks.

The Brelands didn’t use positive reinforcement to create behaviors out of nowhere. They simply encouraged existing behaviors and brought them under stimulus control—a fancy way of saying that they created situations where the animals would engage in the behaviors at the right moment, in the right place. The chicken dancing was only doing the kind of scratching that chickens do innately, probably to crush seeds and grain. What made it magical was the chicken doing it on the stage, just after the music started playing.

The Brelands’ coin-operated machines were shipped around the world, with ducks from Tokyo to South Dakota in identical little pale-yellow rooms, turning on identical pink lamps and then banging out tunes on identical tiny Schoenhut pianos. They would be rewarded only after plunking the piano keys a certain number of times.

In the Brelands’ world, the ducks learned that they could convert coins into duck food if they behaved a certain way. And the ducks did so with enough reliability to build a business that, by the early 1960s, was already well into its second decade.

“Wide applications of the Breland theories and techniques could eliminate many vicious training methods,” The National Humane Review wrote in 1954. “What Mr. and Mrs. Breland preach and practice is this: to train an animal, make the animal enjoy what you want it to do. In a single word: kindness.”

Despite ringing endorsements of this kind, dog people weren’t interested in buying what the Brelands were selling. The young couple approached dog food companies about bringing their techniques to pet owners, but they were sent home. These companies already had trainers on their staff, and they were getting just fine results. Look at Lassie! 

“The Brelands were threatening essentially the working lives of people who were out there using coercion as their primary means of training dogs,” Bailey explains. “[Positive reinforcement] is totally contrary to the idea at the time, which was that the animal was supposed to do what you wanted. And if not, you provided a punishment to this animal. That was accepted.”

The Brelands continued their research on operant conditioning, and broke new ground in their 1961 paper, “The Misbehavior of Organisms.” The paper married the field of animal behavior to ethology, which is the study of what animals do to survive and thrive and reproduce, to survive and thrive some more—to earn a living, if you will. What the Brelands suggested was that no animal was tabula rasa, that instincts are always part of the picture and cannot always be fully overridden. To teach effectively, we need to understand how the animal has evolved to earn a living.

After a career of training chickens for tic-tac-toe (a retired unit is currently preserved at the Smithsonian), dolphins for the Navy, cats for the CIA, and seagulls to retrieve objects from miles away, Bailey tells me what most motivated the animals he worked with: food and security.

“People keep trying to make it more complicated,” he says again about animal training. “Teach it as simple steps, not complicated steps. That’s my word to the world.”

I mentioned to him that I had done an iteration of his “Chicken Camp” and had spent a week training a chicken to peck at a yellow dot.

“But afterward, what did you do?” he said. “After you taught the discrimination? What did you do?”

I thought about it and remembered the final exercise of the week: We had to teach the chicken to stop pecking the yellow dot. To anyone who might have been watching through the window, it wouldn’t have looked like much had changed. 

But with the help of clickers and bird feed, we had moved from training one behavior to training its inverse: training the chicken not to do what it was doing before. The difference was subtle but important—and a reminder that you can elegantly get one behavior to stop by teaching another. 

“All that stuff that you did before was in preparation for that,” he said. Then he surprised me again, and said something that sounded a little Cesar Millan-y: “You learned about yourself.”

Indeed, I had. I learned I love training chickens.

Excerpted from How to Train Your Dog With Love + Science © 2024 by Annie Grossman. Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Source Books, a division of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved.