A Conversation With … William Berloni, Broadway and Hollywood Animal Trainer, on the Differences Between Training and Education

Many readers of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research® participate in an activity called “residency training,” either on the giving or the taking side, and most of our readers went through it. I should confess up front that I never liked the term “training” when applied to surgical learners, but despite editing a journal for 12 years, I can’t seem to make it go away. It’s always struck me that “resident education” would be more apt. After all, these are young adults we’re talking about, not dressage horses. And then, some years ago, a group studying the acquisition of surgical skills in New York, USA found that operant conditioning worked better for teaching moderately complex surgical tasks than did demonstration [7]. Yes, this is the same operant conditioning that you remember from undergraduate biology: BF Skinner’s technique, the one that reinforces correct actions using an audible, mechanical clicker. My goodness. But maybe I’m being too chauvinistic. I do understand that repetition is a key principle both in animal training and adult education, so maybe the distinction is blurrier than I’ve believed. Maybe the idea that we are “higher animals” really means higher animals. So I decided to reach out to a man who has trained everything from butterflies to llamas, canaries to crows, and even cockroaches [2], making each one ready for its big moment on stage or screen. Given that amazing background, I thought he might be able to tell us something about teaching surgery, and maybe about learning it, too. His name is William Berloni, and there’s a good chance you’ve seen an animal he’s trained on TV or in the movies. His first break—the one that got him his Equity card in the Actor’s Equity Association—was training the first “Sandy” in the original stage production of the musical, Annie, back in 1976 (Fig. 1). Sandy didn't miss a performance in 7 years, and became the longest running dog on Broadway [3]. Mr. Berloni since has trained hundreds and hundreds of dogs for thousands of performances over a career that has spanned 5 decades (Fig. 2). His most recent major credit, of course, was training Bing the Great Dane to play “Apollo” in the beautiful 2024 movie by Bill Murray and Naomi Watts, The Friend (Fig. 3) [9,11]. (Go see it. If you can make it through that movie without tears, you are far more well-defended than I am.)Fig. 1: William Berloni with the original “Sandy,” rehearsing at The Goodspeed Opera House in 1976. This photo was originally published in Broadway Tails [4].Fig. 2: William Berloni with Argyle on break during the Broadway production of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” This photo was originally published in Broadway Tails [4].Fig. 3: William Berloni takes a walk with Bing, the Harlequin Great Dane that starred in the movie, The Friend. © Bill BerloniIf you acknowledge that training an animal to do something on screen is hard, and that making sure the animal does it night after night live on stage is harder still, I’m sure you’ll agree that getting a well-trained dog that has never been in a production to do exactly the opposite of what his owner has trained him to do for years is the test of a pro. “Go onto the bed and stay there” when told to get off. “Steal the t-shirt and do not give it back.” In short, his job is to get the dog to be a bad boy when he’s worked so hard to be a good one. Other pro tasks might involve getting geese and rabbits ready for opening night and long runs on stage [8]. Mr. Berloni has done all this and more. Makes sense that he’s the only animal trainer to have received a Tony award [5]. And unlike some of surgical training—and many commonly used animal-training approaches that use inhumane, aversive techniques [1, 6]—Mr. Berloni does all of his work with kindness. He is a true animal advocate, having taken the side of rescue animals for nearly 50 years; he thinks he’s “had maybe 300 rescue dogs” over the course of his life, and every dog he’s ever trained professionally has been a rescue. He has won numerous humanitarian awards for his work and now serves as the Director of Animal Behavior and Training at the Humane Society of New York. I know you’re not going to do the things Mr. Berloni does when you go to the clinic or operating room tomorrow (or at least not exactly as he does them). But what you learn from him may help you “train” someone, or discover something new about yourself when it comes to learning. So let’s take it from the pro. Join me in the conversation that follows with William Berloni, professional trainer of everything, from butterflies to llamas and beyond, on the differences and similarities between training and education. (Editor’s Note: This interview was transcribed from a video call and has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.) Seth S. Leopold MD:Thanks for agreeing to visit with us. Let’s get right into it—what do you see as the main differences and similarities between what you do and what a surgeon might do with a surgical learner? Stated otherwise, what do training and education have in common, and where do they differ? William Berloni: I'm going to start by saying that training and education are two totally different things: Education requires a cognitive thought process whereas training is just operant conditioning. That's the main difference between animals and humans—whereas animals can only do operant conditioning, humans can learn both ways. People will always come to me and ask, “How do I teach my dog to do this trick?” But, for me, training is not teaching skills; training is teaching the animal to want to listen and learn, because once that animal is motivated to learn, I can teach it anything. This is why I think training is more important than the cognitive processes of learning, believe it or not. I think one of the main similarities between what I do and surgical educators do is that we have to teach our charges something totally unique and out of the box. Our charges come to us with no real reference point. For you, the mechanics of your medical specialty are known to students from an education system, not from the realities of an operating room or the other real-world things they will eventually encounter as a surgeon. So we're both charged with having to teach somebody something for which they have no reference point to start with. This is why creating a positive learning environment through operant conditioning is important. I could teach a dog to stay by saying, “If you move, you're in trouble,” and reinforce his behaviors accordingly. Or, I could say, “If you sit there and do nothing, you'll get rewarded. Relax.” Now, instead of a fear-dominated system, operant conditioning becomes a relaxation exercise. You have to let them know in the beginning that you’re there for them, you're going to keep them safe, and you’re going to work this out together. Dr. Leopold:In many ways, my job is much easier than yours. I can ask my surgical learners how they think they learn best. You can’t do that with a goose, a donkey, or a Great Dane. In some of the profiles I’ve read about you [9, 11], your powers of observation seem honed to a very high degree. What has helped you become such a good observer, and how can surgical educators develop that skill? This is important to us, since even though our learners may believe they know how they learn, we can’t always accommodate those requests, and we still have to make sure what we’re doing is working. Mr. Berloni: I grew up on a farm as an only child. Until I went to kindergarten, my only companions were a dog, a cat, and a rabbit. I don't remember being very lonely, so I must have learned how to be other-centered as a very young child—if those animals didn't like how I played with them, they would have walked away. This put me in a position of being able to read animal behavior somewhat at a very young age. That skill evolved into an ability to communicate and understand any species nonverbally. All the creatures I interact with are telling me what they feel and what they understand or don't understand through body language. Understanding body language is particularly helpful when I work with humans because, as we know, humans can say one thing and feel completely different inside. So if you ask a student how they learn best, you would probably get some sort of academic answer they know will please you. I think that's the wrong question to be asking. One of my simple philosophies is taken from the Karate Kid movie. At one point, a character says, “the failure of the student is the failure of the teacher.” Remember, learning isn't just about the education; it's about the training, and cultivating a desire within the learner to want to learn and move forward. You have to be able to understand what the student is feeling in that moment before you can clear all that stuff out and find the place where they're ready to move forward. You have to remove the student’s fear, confusion, and fatigue if you want to optimize their learning and education. It’s not, “Hey, how do you want to learn today?” It’s looking at someone and going, “Oh, he’s coming from a 30-hour shift… Hey, how are you feeling today?” So even though it sounds counterintuitive, one way that an educator can start honing their observation skills is by becoming more of an empathetic “people-person.” Once you learn where a student’s mind is at in that particular moment, you can take that next step to maximize their learning. Dr. Leopold:You’ve been at this awhile now. What helps you “keep it fresh” after 50 or so years? Mr. Berloni: When I see my charges succeed. When you see an animal look at you, take a cue, and willingly do something for your approval—that's exciting to me. That's communicating with another species, and we're getting a job done together. If I were an educator, I would be thrilled every time a student made advances. That means they’re going out better than when they came in, and I've done the best I could. I think it’s also important for educators to learn from every student, in terms of success and failure, to not only stay motivated, but to continuously improve. Every animal teaches me something that I need to work on for the next one. Your subjects are in front of you, but if you focus on the grades, you're missing important lessons on how to motivate them. Dr. Leopold:You drew a distinction between education and training earlier, and you felt the training has a big role to play even with people. I mentioned a paper [7] (and it’s not the only one [10]) in which surgical learners were taught reasonably complex tasks through operant conditioning using a mechanical clicker à la BF Skinner. If you were going to “train” a surgeon, is that the approach you’d use, or are there other ways you’ve found to be more effective when trying to teach and learn something through repetition? Mr. Berloni: First, let’s talk about why clicker training works so well for dogs. In operant conditioning, there's a cue, a response, and either an immediate reward or negative or positive reinforcer. The positive reinforcement is trying to capture the correct behavior. So you say, “Sandy, sit,” and then, “good dog!” when their butt hits the ground. When they don’t do it, you say, “Sandy, sit, no,” and you make them sit. So you have to understand when to apply praise or negative reinforcement. Well, a lot of people can’t get the words straight. They can’t get the timing straight. They just can’t understand it enough to do it right. This is why clickers became so popular—when the dog's butt hits the ground, you click. This is easier for some folks to understand as a timing mechanism than their own voice. So now, let's look at that from a human perspective. Which is more encouraging: hearing a professor say, “yes, that's right; yes, good,” or a metallic click when you've done it well again? If I were a student, I would feel encouraged by the tone of my educator’s voice. It would help me feel like we're connected. A clicker is just a mechanical judgment of right or wrong; it may correct the situation, but it doesn't necessarily motivate me to learn. It needs to be personal to keep me engaged, confident, and out of my own head. For your learners, I think the best approach is keeping that special human connection in mind, like, “Hey, we're going to take care of you. We're here for you. You can always come to me, and if we get frustrated, we're going to talk about it.” It’s allowing the students to know that they are no longer fighting for a 1 in 100 chance to get into your training program. It’s time to move forward and learn in a positive way. It goes back to what I said in the beginning—the cognitive thought process is the easy part! Dr. Leopold:Like you, we have to keep learning. Has what you've learned about training caused you to interrogate and modify the ways you think about learning yourself? Mr. Berloni: Yes. I'm not a big reader; never was. I’m more of an artistic doer, and because of that, for a long time, I thought that I was just not an “intelligent” person. But over the years, I realized that I just have a different set of skills. Now, when I’m asked to do something in a way that doesn’t use my best skills, I ask if I can do it differently—for example, “Can we do this interview verbally as opposed to me responding in writing?” A younger me would have been embarrassed to ask for help when receiving an interview request for a written publication, like, “Oh great, now I'm going struggle for 2 days trying to write this interview down and get the spelling right and see if it makes sense…” The animals have taught me not just how to forgive myself as a learner, but also how to be empathetic to the way others learn best. Dr. Leopold:Sometimes we struggle to reach a learner. Sometimes it's me, sometimes it's the learner, sometimes it's the relationship between me and the learner. But what I notice first is the struggle. Any tips for those moments, perhaps even when we realize there’s a struggle before we identify the cause of it? Mr. Berloni: One of the first things I learned how to do was slow my heartbeat down. There is an intellectual part of “the struggle,” and there's an emotional part, as well. You're both in a frustrated sort of semi-angry mode, which can lead to defensive and protective actions or words. You start feeding off of each other, and then, all of a sudden, you're just trying not to get hurt by the other person. When I realize I’m in a power struggle with an animal, I go, “Okay, let's stop. I'm going to walk away and take a few breaths. I'm going to slow my heartbeat down and get all this angst out of my body before I turn to the animal and go, ‘Okay, let's try this again.’” If you don’t remove the negative energy, slow down your heartbeat, and give yourself space to breathe a little bit, you’ll come back just as hard with all that frustration, because we’re human. In your field, a student saying, “I don't understand,” can really mean, “I'm angry and frustrated.” So how can you as the educator remove that student’s anger and frustration so you both can get back to a clear understanding? I think it starts with taking a “time out,” and if that doesn’t work, perhaps talking to a neutral third-party person could help you figure out what the disconnect is. Because it's not just you not getting through to them; the student isn't making you understand what their needs are, either. Remember your students are learning in a high-pressure environment, because that is the nature of surgery. Dr. Leopold:Finally, my dog, Argos, is a very good boy, wouldn’t you say? Mr. Berloni: Oh, yes, he’s a great dog. Dr. Leopold:I’ll tell him you said so.