Sad News: Karen Pryor has died

Karen Pryor died on January 4, 2025. Famed for teaching the world how to use a simple tool to teach skills to animals (very much including humans), she had a long life filled with adventures and animals (very much including humans) of many kinds.

The photo you see here shows Karen Pryor at the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, at Harvard University. She is the woman in the blue dress. She and colleague Theresa McKeon (wearing the white striped shirt) are receiving the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for education, for using a simple animal-training technique— called “clicker training” —to help new doctors acquire basic surgical skills. (That research is documented in the study  “Is Teaching Simple Surgical Skills Using an Operant Learning Program More Effective Than Teaching by Demonstration,” Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, vol. 474, no. 4, April 2016, pp. 945–955. We have been told that some eminent older surgeons were and are outraged at the notion that medical students can be taught using some of the same methods used to train dogs. Karen Pryor was amused at that outrage.) Nobel laureate Rich Roberts, wearing the Britannia hat, is seen handing the prize to the winners. Alexey Eliseev photographed the moment. In the background Ig Nobel human curtain rod Maria Eliseeva upholds a curtain rod.

That 2019 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony also included a new mini-opera that featured a song about Pryor and McKeon’s using-clicker-training-to-teach-medical-students study. Immediately prior to that song, Pryor delivered a 24/7 lecture about clicker training. You can see the tiny lecture and the song in this video [NOTE: depending on the momentary state of the internet, the video might begin at its very beginning if you click on the image you see here; Karen Pryor’s talk begins at about the 42:20 point]:

Among her many accomplishments, one is both easily accessible and endlessly useful to almost anyone: the book called Don’t Shoot the Dog, which is as much about dealing with people as it is about dealing with dogs.