Dealing with Fear - Touch New Toy - Parrot Behavior / Psychology

We taught our parrots without knowing anything about target training, so for our guys, "touch" means "Touch -- No bite". We use it to tell them it is okay to investigate something and "feel" it with their tongue. For anyone reading this who doesn't know about parrots -- they will use their tongue to touch and feel objects in the same way we use our fingers.

We also use the "touch" instruction to help our parrots to overcome fears. When we see that they are scared or wary of something, we encourage them to "touch" it. We will touch it too -- to show them that it's not dangerous. Once they touch it, that usually reduces or removes the fear. In fact, it works so well that we had to find something AWFULLY big and scary to show the whole process. Otherwise, if it's something wimpy, they get over it within a couple of touches.

They have now surprised us at times by going up and touching something on their own that they consider scary. You can tell because they will approach it with the obvious caution, make a very tentative touch with the tongue, and then run away. It is so cute. After a little bit, they work it out on their own. If we can capture this on video, we will put it up.

For this video, we intentionally put a new foraging toy up during the night when they were asleep. When they came out the next morning, there was this new THING on the playgym. Being a Grey, Bobo had an overt fear, but you will notice that the others also had reservations. In fact, the Jenday, Grasshopper, was really good about her "touch" but then very quickly retreated. LOL They are clever kids.

NOTE -- the person holding the African Grey is also the person doing the video, so after each touch, the camera was stopped to give a treat.

Please keep in mind that we are NOT professional trainers. We rely strictly on the intelligence of our birds when we teach them tricks, which doesn't work for everyone. We recommend that if you are interested in training your parrots, that you visit the site of a professional trainer to learn proper training techniques.

We demonstrated this technique to a professional trainer, who has years of experience with zoos and pets. He let us know it was unique. Our primary reason for putting it up here was because we needed to show what we meant when we described this method to others -- so we could link people to it for research and discussion.

Видео Dealing with Fear - Touch New Toy - Parrot Behavior / Psychology канала flychomperfly