Skinner, the Harvard University psychologist who was, in the middle of the 20th century, the most cited scholar of the human mind after Freud. While Pavlov plays a part in our story-“I have a saying in the training business,” Bailey says, “Pavlov is always on your shoulder”-the real inspiration is B.F. Over time, the spider so associates one with the other that the mere appearance of the former is enough to trigger a “conditioned response.” The laser is a conditioned stimulus, the breath an unconditioned stimulus. This is Psych 101: Pavlovian, or “classical,” conditioning. He returned to the classroom where Garrett was lecturing and announced: “You’ve got a trained spider in your bathroom.” “By the time I finished all I had to do is turn that light on,” he says, and the spider would go defensive. Bailey did this at several intervals during the day. “They pull themselves down into the smallest size they can get and hunker down.” “Spiders don’t like wind-it blows their web down,” he says. “I looked down at this spider and said, hmmm.” He took out his laser, turned it on, and gently blew on the spider. One day, he was in the bathroom and saw a spider. A few years ago, Bailey was teaching a course on stimulus control for her students. Garrett, it turns out, is a world champion trainer in the sport of dog agility. “Never.”Īs I try to summon particularly challenging creatures-Alligators? Moles? Crustaceans?-he asks, “Do you know who Susan Garrett is?” I do not. (One is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.) “Never,” he repeats, as we sit in the book-cluttered living room of his modest lakefront house in Hot Springs. “We never found an animal we could not train,” says Bailey, 76, who in his career has done everything from teaching dolphins to detect submarines to inventing the Bird Brain, an apparatus that enabled a person to play tick-tack-toe against a chicken.
The use of animals in military intelligence dates back to ancient Greece, but the work that this trio undertook in the 1960s promised an entirely new level of sophistication, as if James Bond’s Q had met Marlin Perkins.
Spy duck goose goose duck plus#
Skinner, plus Bob Bailey, the first director of training for the Navy’s pioneering dolphin program. At the center of this Venn diagram were two acolytes of the psychologist B.F. The same methods that lay behind Priscilla the Fastidious Pig or the Educated Hen informed projects such as training ravens to deposit and retrieve objects, pigeons to warn of enemy ambushes, or even cats to eavesdrop on human conversations. But wars make strange bedfellows, and in one of the most curious, if little-known, stories of the cold war, the people involved in making poultry dance or getting cows to play bingo were also involved in training animals, under government contract, for defense and intelligence work. Two scenes, seemingly disjointed: the John le Carré shadows against the bright midway lights of county-fair Americana. But chances are that if an animal had been trained to do something whimsically human, the animal-or the technique-came from Hot Springs. You would find much the same in any number of mom-and-pop theme parks or on television variety shows of the era. With their vacationing parents inca tow, children would squeal as they watched chickens play baseball, macaws ride bicycles, ducks drumming and pigs pawing at pianos.
Zoo, one of the touristic palaces that dotted the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1960s.
Half a world away from the murk of the cold war, it would be a typical day at the I.Q. The raven that transported it to the ledge was no random city bird, but a U.S.-trained intelligence asset. In a small cavity at the slate’s center was an electronic transmitter powerful enough to pick up their conversation. Those in the apartment might be dismayed to learn, however, that the slate had come not from the roof but from a technical laboratory at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Nor would anything seem amiss in the jagged piece of gray slate resting on the ledge, seemingly jetsam from the roof of an old and unloved building. In an apartment on the other side of the window, no one would shift his attention from the briefing papers or the chilled vodka set out on a table. The bird would pace across the ledge a few times but quickly depart. There would be a rustle of oily black feathers as a raven settled on the window ledge of a once-grand apartment building in some Eastern European capital.
0 kommentar(er)
