Biting Parrot – The Solution (part 3)

Parrots, like human beings and other animals, do not like to be forced to do anything that is against their will. Often times, coming up to the cage and sticking your hand in disturbs the parrot’s environment and leads to biting. If the parrot is perfectly content and safe in the parrot without human attention, then it is unlikely to want or appreciate it.

The training diet is an important component of eliminating biting behavior because it gives the trainer something to motivate the parrot. As I have discussed in previous articles, the training diet does not have to be limited to food. You can use coming out of the cage, toys, attention, and vocalizations in addition to food as motivations not to bite.

The most important thing is to NEVER reward biting behavior. Generally the reason parrots bite is to block unwanted contact. The parrot is trying to train you by using negative reinforcement for the approaching behavior. If you back away, yell, scream, or leave the parrot alone, you will be REWARDING the biting behavior and increase the likelihood of the parrot learning to bite in similar situations again in the future.

Since we cannot use punishment to eliminate biting (because punishment will just lead to more fight/flight mentality and more biting), that only leaves us with the opportunity to use positive reinforcement instead. The only way to teach a bird not to bite is to reward it for doing ANYTHING other than biting. This can mean doing a trick, sitting quietly on a perch, vocalizing, or even stepping on your hand. Teaching your bird to do a trick when it is angry is a great way to distract it from the reason it wanted to bite and turn it into a positive situation.

Targeting onto finger is the ultimate step before regressing involvement of target stick

The reason I think targeting is the best tool for teaching parrots to step up is because it lets them make all the decisions and do all of the learning. The parrot is faced with a voluntary choice, follow target stick onto hand and get treat or just walk away from it and get nothing. This lets the parrot feel like it is choosing to step onto you rather than the classic “poke parrot with a stick until it steps on it style training.” Since you are not forcing the parrot to do anything, the parrot has virtually no motivation to bite you. Worst case scenario, it doesn’t choose to walk over to step up.

5) Don’t expect instant results – If your bird is biting, it probably learned to use biting to achieve something it wants. You cannot expect to undue months or years of learning to bite overnight. You have to be consistent, focused, and keep trying. If you start projecting human like thoughts on the bird (“it hates me,” “it’s doing it to spite me”), you will only disappoint yourself and not achieve results. This process can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years. The only way you will get results is if you keep trying until your bird gets to the right point. The only way I can guarantee you will not earn results is by giving up.

At first it may be difficult for a new parrot owner to differentiate between fear, aggression, and other signs the parrot may be showing. As you become more experienced with your bird, you will start to be able to predict what the bird’s behavior will be. For a parrot that always bites, it is actually pretty obvious that when you come near it, it will bite. The difficulty sooner comes with a parrot that is generally good but bites on occasion. That is the situation where you will have to learn to read your parrot and try to avoid those disturbances that make it bite. For the always biting parrot, you are going to have to teach it a new lifestyle through training diet, clicker conditioning, target training, and a lot of patience. Follow these steps, and you won’t have to deal with situations like this: