Non-Food Parrot Diet

I pet my Senegal Parrot in response to her petting herself or getting fluffed up if she has been quiet and well behaved. If she screams for attention or bites to demand being pet, I ignore her. Thus she is learning favorable behavior and I am using petting as a reward.

Petting Diet

My Senegal Parrot likes being pet so I ration that as well. I do not pet her (even if I want to) if she is doing something undesirable. On the other hand I will reward her for doing something good by petting her. This can work well as a reward when the bird is not hungry for food rewards. As part of a personal experiment, I almost exclusively reward my parrot with petting rather than a food reward for doing the bat trick. Since it is such a hands on trick, it is just easier for me to pet her rather than rush to get a treat. Even without the food reward, she still performs the trick enthusiastically.

So instead of petting your bird just whenever you want something soft to cuddle, consider petting your bird for a favorable behavior. A favorable behavior doesn’t even have to be a trick per say. A favorable behavior can be sitting on its perch and not flying off (for a bird that is flighty) or a favorable behavior can be sitting quietly for a bird that is normally noisy.

Whatever you consider to be the favorable behavior, make sure you are rewarding that favorable behavior and ignoring (and most certainly not rewarding) the unfavorable. If you want your bird to sit on its perch unless you take it off, do not pet your bird if it gets off the perch and runs/flies over to you. By rationing the petting to behaviors you want the bird to do, your bird will learn to do more of that to get the attention it enjoys.

Often times I will reward my bird for behaviors that deserve a reward but not food every time. For instance I will scratch my birds head for stepping onto my hand sometimes or for coming out of the cage without an effort. I do not give this reward every time but my bird knows what it should do and knows that it should try every time to not miss out on the chance to get that reward.

Trick Training Diet

And I mean literally a rationing of the amount of training and not the amount of food. If you train your bird too much, it may just get tired of training. I try to end my bird training on a good note and the bird wanting more. After a while, bird trick training really goes beyond just having a chance to eat food for your bird. I think my parrot genuinely enjoys the process of training for all the excitement and attention. I think it finds the earning of the reward even more rewarding than the food itself. And the way I know this is because my bird will sometimes go on training after not being hungry and spit out the earned treats. Imagine that? A parrot doing a trick and spitting out an unopened sunflower seed! Yes! Parrots really can learn to enjoy the training but it is important to keep it all in good fun and never push them too much. The birds should look forward to training rather than try to avoid it.

The next article in this series will compare the merits of food vs social diets for companion parrots.