Remembering Alexandra Kurland | Karen Pryor Clicker Training

Yesterday, we unexpectedly lost Alexandra Kurland, and we are still absorbing this news. Alex’s relationship with Karen Pryor Clicker Training goes back decades. She was one of Karen’s earliest and closest collaborators, and one of the truest builders of this field. Sunshine Books (Karen Pryor Clicker Training) published several of her titles over the years, and she was one of the original ClickerExpo faculty members — active and contributing throughout our most recent events. We had just announced her return for 2027. We’re left writing about her instead of having another chance to share her and her latest insights with trainers worldwide.

Alex’s work centered on horses, and she loved horses as passionately as many people feel about dogs. Horses, she was quick to point out, represented a level of challenge and danger that dogs, in general, did not. Plus, she felt they were infinitely easier, in her view, to care for, the best company, super intelligent, and she would be happy to expound on that point of view if asked! She cared for her and other horses exceptionally well at her home in upstate NY in her beautiful barn and training ring.

Alex earned her degree from Cornell, where she specialized in animal behavior. She spent the better part of her life translating that knowledge into something horses and the people who love them could actually use. Her path there wasn’t a straight line — she came up through Linda Tellington-Jones’ TTEAM work, through dressage under Bettina Drummond, through John Lyons’ training — before she picked up a clicker in the early 1990s and never looked back.

What always struck us, and what we think will be her broader legacy, is how far her ideas traveled outside the barn. Her thinking on rein and rope handling shaped how people think about leash handling. Her training loops became a direct template for how we talk about the movement cycle and shaping behavior generally. Her insights into the micro-mechanics of muscle movement advanced the concept of micro-shaping. Every year, she had multiple ideas for her ClickerExpo presentations and her teaching methods, and she was pleasantly persistent in making sure we heard them! We all loved that side of her. Our discussions could go on for literally hours if we wanted them to, and she would not be deterred from seeing those ideas come to fruition, which led to a life full of experimentation, learning, and invention. She was working with horses, but she was teaching all of us how to train and convey ideas.

That was Alex in a nutshell: she loved learning as much as she loved training and teaching, and for her, clicker training wasn’t a technique; it was a way of living. She said yes to hard problems. For example, her work with Ann Edie included clicker training one of the first miniature service horses, Panda, for a blind client. It was groundbreaking, and when Alex brought Ann and Panda to ClickerExpo in Newport, Rhode Island, it was thrilling—an iconic experience we still talk about.

Alex built a career full of collaboration. Beyond her long partnership with Karen and us, she worked closely with Michele Pouliot, Jesús Rosales-Ruiz, Mary Hunter, Emelie Johnson Vegh, Eva Bertilsson, Kay Laurence, among many others, and, most recently, with Dominique Day on their podcast. She was a constant, revered, and unique voice in the community who has advanced positive reinforcement, and it’s the community that will carry her work forward now.

We will miss her insight, her curiosity, and her willingness to dive headfirst into whatever she felt the field needed next. Our thoughts are with everyone who knew and trained alongside her, and with everyone whose relationship with their animals is better today because Alex decided, one afternoon in a barn thirty-some years ago, to try something new. She was, as the saying goes, a horse of a different—and quite beautiful—color.

Rest well, Alex.

Aaron Clayton, Ken Ramirez, and the entire Karen Pryor Clicker Training team