Marian Breland Bailey: The Mouse Who Reinforced

Abstract

EVERYONE HAS READ ABOUT THE SMART BOMBS of Desert Storm. After a pilot pointed his laser at a target in Baghdad, a plane would deliver a bomb that followed the beam to the target. But in 1942, smart bombs consisted of three pigeons tucked into cradles in a bomb's nose cone. They had been taught to peck at a target shown on a ground-glass screen in exchange for food. If the bomb deviated from the target, the pigeons' pecks at the screen would transmit signals to correct the bomb's heading. The man who had devised the procedure for teaching the pigeons to perform their patriotic duty was the pioneering psychologist B. F. Skinner.1 He was assisted by Keller and Marian Breland. Years later, during the Vietnam War, Marian Breland and Bob Bailey, research director of her firm, Animal Behavior Enterprises, trained U.S. Army Special Forces to use pigeons to prevent ambushes. A pigeon would fly along a road or trail ahead of the soldiers and their vehicles. If it saw men lying in ambush along the route, it would alert the troops by circling a few times and then light in a tree at that location until recalled. In between these two wars, Marian and her first husband, Keller Breland, had become the most experienced and accomplished mammal, fish, reptile, and bird trainers in the world, and they did most of their work in Hot Springs, Arkansas. They were the first scientists to see that the methods used in that original pigeon project of World War II could be employed to train animals to do almost anything within the creature's repertoire to work for and to entertain humans. Using Arkansas as their base, the Brelands devised techniques that would be used in famous animal parks and zoos throughout the United States, as well as in South America, Asia, and Europe. Hot Springs became the place for scientists and students alike to go if they wanted to see how it was done. Marian Kruse and Keller Breland met at the University of Minnesota in 1940 after Marian literally bumped into Keller. She was rushing towards the health center after being bitten by a lab rat that she had been feeding. They married a year later. Keller was majoring in industrial psychology and already had established a reputation for his independent views. He valued psychology as a science but also believed the knowledge revealed by research should be useful and profitable. Marian Kruse had been born and raised in Minneapolis, where she had many pets, including dogs and cats. As a child she visited her uncle's farm, where there were many more animals, including a pony. Her favorite books were Black Beauty, Call of The Wild, and Thornton Burgess's writings about animals. Her family called her Mouse because of her size, and the name stuck. She entered the University of Minnesota in 1938, first majoring in history and foreign languages. But after taking a seminar from a young assistant professor of psychology, B. F. Skinner, she switched her majors. She graduated summa cum laude in 1941 with majors in psychology and Latin and minors in child psychology and Greek. She immediately entered graduate school at Minnesota, majoring in psychology with a minor in statistics. To help make ends meet she taught statistics from 1941 to 1944 at the university's medical school. When the country went to war in 1941, many psychologists employed their expertise to aid the war effort. Skinner, an expert in the psychology of learning, went to work on Project Pelican, developing procedures to train pigeons to guide missiles. He chose pigeons because they were such hardy birds and so adaptable to handling and training, as well as being keen-sighted. He took with him several of his graduate students, including Keller and Marian Breland, to assist with the project. The experimental work took place on the top floor of the General Mills Washburn-Crosby mill, where they set up an entire pigeon laboratory. There, in a bank of sixteen modified Skinner boxes, pigeons learned to peck at targets superimposed on ground-glass screens. …

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