This is maybe overcomplicating this. Bob and Marion Bailey of Animal Behavior Enterprises developed a system where they could take nearly any animal and train it in a minimum of time using an established protocol and potentially an automated training environment like a Skinner box. And, yes, they developed those protocols by careful record-keeping (unfortunately that trove of scientific documentation was destroyed in a fire many years ago). Those protocols can evolve over time as people come up with more effective steps, but the current protocol is always going to be effective, because it's based on lots of data. If you have an effective protocol, you _start_ with that and only then do you start to add your own tweaks. I think it was Bob who said "First imitate, then innovate," but I don't remember if that originated with him or if he was citing someone else.