Biting Parrot – The Solution (part 1)

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Territorial parrot bites approaching strangers.

Kili, my Senegal Parrot, can be described as cute, lovable, and cuddly by some (that would be me). But my girlfriend would sooner describe the parrot as a ferocious, atrocious, little beast. With hormones raging, an ongoing molt, and the troubles of bird life, Kili gets very territorial and aggressive toward people other than myself. She can be describes as a “one person bird” as Senegal Parrots often are.

This is the classic tale of a biting parrot. In many cases the parrot bites everyone including the owner. I suppose I am lucky that my bird is so bonded to me, but then again I’ve been working with her and teaching her tricks since she was a baby. Nonetheless, these techniques work for anyone and any bird. This is because they are based on the rudimentary elements of behavioral psychology and are aimed to work at the most basic level.

Here is my 5 step process to go from a biting bird to a bird that will step onto your hand without biting:

1) Forgive and forget - From this moment on, if you want to give it your parrot an honest shot at making this work, you cannot blame your parrot ever. You have to accept responsibility and also realize that you are on a higher level than your parrot. You have to be the adult and be a role model for your bird. You can never assume that because your bird bit last time that it will bite this time. You have to give it a fresh chance every time. If you keep assuming your bird will bite, your behavior will send the same signal to your bird that caused it to bite all the time before. This does not mean you have to take bites all the time, we will discuss some ways to avoid the actual flesh tearing bites, but you will have to pretend to ignore the aggression.

Lingering on bites or past experiences ruins training progress.

2) Training Diet - If your bird is not on a training diet and is biting you, that explains a lot. In some cases, a proper food diet change alone can improve bird behavior. Get your parrot on a pellet diet and moderate the amount of food it gets. Only give food to your parrot as a reward for correct behavior. Never give your bird a reward for biting. Never give your bird a non-food reward for biting. There is so much info available about training diet so I will not go through all the details. Instead, read this article about food based training diet, and then you can read this series abut non-food training diets (ways you can get your bird do stuff even when it isn’t hungry). So if your bird is not already on one, don’t make any excuses and put it on a training diet because you will not succeed in getting your bird to stop biting if it has no reason to.

Pellets are a good basis for training diet. Save seed/nut treats exclusively for training.

3) Clicker Conditioning – This is actually the fun and easy part. Clicker conditioning is simply to make your bird used to eating treats out of your hand and associating the sound of a click from a clicker. You can buy these in most pet stores (check dog training) or online. When your bird is hungry (before meal time), sit next to your bird’s cage (assuming you can’t take it out, if you can then take it somewhere else), have clicker in hand and bird’s favorite treats ready. Your bird should be calm and focused. If the bird is trying to attack you through the bars or run away, you are going to need to do power pause first. Ideally you should be at the side of the cage the bird is and it should neither attack or run away. It should just sit and watch you. From this point all you have to do is click the clicker and immediately give a treat to your bird. You should repeat this until your bird doesn’t want anymore treats and do this for a couple of sessions to be sure your bird has really picked up on this process. Even if you do a little more of this than you need to, it’s ok because the bird is building a positive association with you and the clicker. Can’t beat being nice and giving treats for no reason.

In the following post, I will get into the actual training involved in teaching the parrot to step up without biting. Be sure to check back and read this because it will be a walk through of the training process involved. In that post, I will show a video of how my girlfriend got bit by my parrot and then step by step the process we used to resolve the biting.