Marian Breland Bailey

On September 25, 2001, Bailey died at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hot Springs.

In 1996, the Baileys began the Bailey & Bailey Operant Conditioning Workshops, which provided training to animal trainers, psychologists, students, and many others from throughout the world. The program of study involved four increasingly advanced levels of the "physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding" workshops. In 1998, the University of Arkansas inducted Bailey into the university's Fulbright College Alumni Academy as one of their first Distinguished Alumni Award recipients.

Bailey's graduate studies had stopped when she and Breland left to found ABE. She returned to graduate school and earned her Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Arkansas in 1978. She then served as a professor of psychology at Henderson State University from 1981 until her retirement in 1998. During these years, the Baileys produced educational films on topics such as the history of behaviorism. Their film work included The History of Behavioral Analysis Biographies, the ABE documentary Patient Like the Chipmunks, and An Apple for the Student: How Behavioral Psychology Can Change the American Classroom.

In 1976, she married Robert (Bob) E. Bailey. He had been the first Director of Training in the Navy's Marine Mammal Program, then became ABE's General Manager. The two of them had founded the facility "Animal Wonderland" in 1972. Among their many activities, the Baileys worked with the Canine Companions for Independence nonprofit organization which trained dogs to assist disabled individuals. Together, the Baileys trained animals from over 140 species.

On June 16, 1965, Breland died of a heart attack. In their 1966 textbook, Bailey described him as the "dreamer" and herself as the "engineer". She continued writing, researching, and training animals.

In 1963, Bailey designed and implemented a program to improve techniques for working with profoundly mentally retarded individuals at a human development center in Alexandria, Louisiana. She emphasized the value of positive reinforcement, and taught ward attendants humane practices that became the standard for institutions of this kind. The 1965 training manual Teaching the Mentally Retarded, which she and others prepared, remained in use for decades.

Bailey and Breland saw the commercial possibilities of operant training. So they left the University of Minnesota without completing their doctorates, and founded Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE) on a farm in Minnesota. Skinner tried to dissuade the couple from abandoning their graduate education for an untested commercial endeavor. Classmate Paul Meehl bet $10 they would fail. (His 1961 check for $10 later hung framed on Bailey's office wall.)

The couple stirred controversy among behaviorists with their 1961 article, "The misbehavior of organisms" – the title of which involved a play on words referring to Skinner's The Behavior of Organisms. Bailey and Breland outlined training difficulties in which instinct or instinctive drift might occur as tendencies biologically inherent in a species intrude into the behaviors a trainer was attempting to teach an animal. The article is recognized as a milestone in the history of psychology.

Bailey led ABE's government research, some of which remains classified to this day. Known projects included the development of an avian ambush detection system. In 1950, Bailey and Breland relocated ABE to a farm near Hot Springs, Arkansas. In 1955, they 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."

Earlier animal trainers had historically relied primarily on punishment when teaching animals. Bailey and Breland instead followed Skinner's emphasis on the use of positive reinforcement to train animals, using rewards for desired behavior. Although other students of Skinner's later entered commercial animal training as well, the pair's techniques dominated the field because they found ways to simplify the training of complex behaviors. The couple 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 were among those who learned from them.

After Bailey earned her bachelor's degree, she married psychologist Keller Bramwell Breland (1915–1965) on August 1, 1941. Together, they had three children: Bradley (1946), Frances (1948), and Elizabeth (1952).

In 1940, Bailey joined Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology. She graduated with her bachelor of arts degree summa cum laude in 1941, the only member of her graduating class with an A average.

Bailey worked as Skinner's teaching and laboratory assistant when he published his pivotal work The Behavior of Organisms in 1938. She trained rats for Skinner, typed lecture notes for him, proofread his book, and even babysat his children. Skinner gave her the final galley proof of his book, which she considered a prized possession. While still an undergraduate student, Bailey met her future husband Keller Breland, who came to call her "Mouse" without knowing that her family called her "Maus". Bailey and others soon decided that her name was Mouse.

Marian Breland Bailey, born Marian Ruth Kruse (December 2, 1920 – September 25, 2001) and nicknamed "Mouse", was an American psychologist, an applied behavior analyst who played a major role in developing empirically validated and humane animal training methods and in promoting their widespread implementation. She and her first husband, Keller Breland (1915–1965), studied at the University of Minnesota under behaviorist B. F. Skinner and became "the first applied animal psychologists." Together they wrote the book Animal Behavior which was first published in 1966, after Keller's death.