User:Doczilla/Sandbox/Keller Bramwell Breland

Keller Bramwell Breland (March 26, 1915 - June 17, 1965) was an American psychologist. He and his wife Marian Kruse Breland played a major role in developing scientifically-validated and humane animal training methods and in promoting the widespread use of these methods.

Professional life
After Marian earned her bachelor's degree, Keller married her on August 1, 1941. Together, they had three children: Bradley (1946), Frances (1948), and Elizabeth (1952).

After his wife became the second graduate student to work under the renowned Skinner. , Keller came to work with Skinner as well. While graduate students, they collaborated with Skinner on military research during World War II. Their work on the Pigeon in a Pelican project involved training pigeons for use by the Navy, teaching the birds to guide bombs in a procedure the military ultimately never implemented.

Having foreseen the commercial applications of operant training, the Brelands left the University of Minnesota without completing their doctorates in order to found Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE) on a farm in Minnesota. Skinner tried to dissuade them from abandoning their graduate education for an untested commercial endeavor. Classmate Paul Meehl bet US$10 they would fail. Meehl's 1961 check for $10 would later hang framed on Marian's office wall.

First training animals commercially for farm feed advertisements for General Mills, the couple went on to train "more animals and different species of animals than any other animal trainers" of their time, including animals of land (e.g., cats, cattle, chickens, dogs, goats, pigs, rabbits, raccoons, rats, sheep), air (e.g., ducks, parrots, ravens), and sea (e.g., dolphins and whales). At their busiest, they trained "more than 1,000 animals at a given time". In training animals for recreational facilities such as Marineland of Florida, Parrot Jungle, Sea World, and Six Flags, they created the very first dolphin and bird shows, a form of program now considered traditional entertainment fare. Most major theme parks' animal programs can be traced back to the Brelands' pioneering work. The Brelands also established the first coin-operated animal shows. The Buck Bunny commercial featured their trained rabbits for a Coast Federal Savings television ad that ran for twenty years and which still holds the record for longest running TV commercial advertisement. They trained animals for many other venues including circuses, movies, museums, stores, and zoos.

Unlike previous animal trainers who had historically concentrated on the use of punishment when teaching animals, the Brelands followed Skinner's emphasis on the use of positive reinforcement to train animals instead by focusing on how best to administer rewards. Although other students of Skinner's later entered commercial animal training as well, the Brelands' techniques dominated the field because they found ways to simplify the training of complex behaviors. The Brelands did not just train the animals. They also trained other animal trainers, establishing in 1947 "the first school and instruction manual for teaching animal trainers the applied technology of behavior analysis." Marlin Perkins of Wild Kingdom and Walt Disney numbered among those who came to learn from them.

Some of ABE's government research remains classified to this day. Known projects included the development of an avian ambush detection system. In 1950, the Brelands relocated ABE to a farm near Hot Springs, Arkansas, and in 1955 opened the I.Q. Zoo in Hot Springs as both a training facility and a showcase of trained animals. "Popular acts included chickens that walked tightropes, dispensed souvenirs and fortune cards, danced to music from jukeboxes, played baseball and ran the bases; rabbits that kissed their (plastic) girlfriends, rode fire trucks and sounded sirens, and rolled wheels of fortune; ducks that played pianos and drums; and raccoons that played basketball."

The Brelands were also "the first to introduce the public to the applied technology of behavior analysis via numerous personal appearances at fairs, exhibitions, and theme parks across the country" and they appeared on well known television shows such as The Today Show, The Tonight Show, Wild Kingdom, and You Asked For It. Publications including Colliers, Life, Popular Mechanics, Reader's Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Time, and even The Wall Street Journal featured them and their work. Although Keller was often the public face of ABE with some ads referring to "Keller Breland's I.Q. Zoo," the Brelands collaborated equally in ABE's endeavors.

The Brelands stirred controversy among behaviorists with their 1961 article, "The misbehavior of organisms" &mdash; the title of which involved a play on words referring to Skinner's classic 1938 work The Behavior of Organisms. Keller and Marian outlined training difficulties in which instinctual or instinctive drift might occur as tendencies biologically inherent in a species intrude into behaviors a trainer is attempting to teach an animal. The article is recognized as a milestone in the history of psychology.

Death
On June 16, 1965, Keller died of a heart attack. In their 1966 textbook, Marian described him as the “dreamer” and herself as the “engineer”. She continued their work, writing, researching, and training animals until her death in 2001.