Kappa's latest trick

[zandperl]

So you may recall, Kappa (dusky conure, 5 years old, I've had her for 4 years) is mostly housebroken / potty trained / whatever you want to call it.

Comments

[zandperl]

No clicker and food rewards, I just can't be consistent with it, but my training method does include both verbal/body language and locational-type incentives. Both clickers and verbal reinforcers require consistency - that is, the more consistent you are, the faster you will get results.

For training her to NOT do something, I have a three strikes rule: the first two times she does the thing I'm trying to train her to stop doing, I say "no" firmly but not angrily and take her away from whatever she's doing. The third time I return her to her cage. Kappa has a pretty strong drive for approval and wants to be near me, so these are sufficient incentives for her. A couple things I've trained her to NOT do are land on heads, and chew headphone cords.

For training her TO do something, each time she does that thing at the appropriate time, I say "good girl!" loudly and excitedly, and make sure to emote body language that reinforces that, and then (if appropriate and not conflicting with what I'm attempting to train her to do) I offer her a finger to step up. Again, she wants approval, and she wants to be near me, so these serve as rewards and over time she figures out what she did to earn that reward. The most consistent thing I've trained her TO do is the pooping, but I also used this to encourage her to sit on a play stand. My consistency on this tends to be worse than training her NOT to do things, so she learns more slowly and is more likely to balk at doing what I want. I've gotten her more used to my handling her wings and feet through this method too; she's still unhappy about both, but when things have happened where I worried she was injured, she's now more likely to let me examine her than before - I think the combination of my having done those things previously, combined with my obvious worry/fear when I think she might have injured herself, are what let her sit still.

As you can see, I'm not big on training tricks, more on everyday animal husbandry things. I'm not sure if my method would be effective for complex tricks, but it's not something that's important to me.

[zandperl]

Thankfully I've never had a bird that thought my shrieking in pain was a fun game, so I've never had to hide pain reactions. :-P