Training is For the Birds Too
Information from Animal Expert Dr. Grey Stafford
 Many people enjoy birds as pets. Among the most popular and intelligent are parrots and macaws. But a bored bird can exhibit all sorts of unwanted, anti-social behaviors including over-protectiveness and aggression.
Bored is bad!
You may be rewarding your bird's anti-social behavior without realizing it, just by the way you feed. Think about it. Let’s say your routine is to put a bowl of food in the cage and leave. Over time, the bird learns that when it's alone, it gets to eat. This means it's far better for its tummy to be left alone in a cage than to be out interacting with people. So why would it want to be sociable? In addition, many pet birds are overfed or fail to get a balanced diet when fed this way. They often pick through a bowl of seed mix eating only the tastiest food items like peanuts while tossing the other items onto the cage floor.
Feeding a bird from a bowl is a missed opportunity to teach it to socialize with you, your family, and friends. Instead of learning to associate its favorite food items with new people and experiences, the bird learns just the opposite! Here's the remedy: make a point to hand feed your bird as much as possible.
Feeding By Hand
Hand feeding teaches the bird several things. Most importantly, it will learn that being with people is a good thing! From there, you can train the bird to reliably perch on the arm of anyone you chose. Birds that are used to being hand fed will be more relaxed in new situations and less likely to guard their home cages, food bowls, or the person with whom they have the strongest bond.
Hand feeding doesn’t have to be too time consuming either. Consider breaking up the daily food requirements into smaller amounts throughout the day and intermixing feeding times with access to a variety of chew toys. If you're pressed for time at a particular feeding, ask the bird for at least one simple behavior such as come forward to face you. Better yet, take a few seconds and ask it to quickly perch on your arm for one or two seeds. Then you can place it back inside the enclosure and reward it with the rest of the bowl for going “home.” Instead of a “free meal” with no strings attached, the bird gets rewarded for displaying cooperative behaviors with whoever is feeding it at that time.
These are short training sessions to be sure. But, they can mean the difference between having a pet that bites the hand that tries to feed it or one that can’t wait to spend time with you.
Learn more about Dr. Grey Stafford
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