Food Diet vs. Social Diets

In the previous two posts, I discussed the types of non food diets that can be used on your bird. Now that you are aware of other ways to ration something your bird wants, you can turn that into a reward and controlling its hand out. In turn, you can use those rewards to motivate your bird to do certain behaviors that you desire.

I would like to outline the difference between food diet and social diets in their practical application and use. The fact is, a food diet is the most concrete, easy to control, and predictable diet that is guaranteed to motivate your bird to learn. This is why the BirdTricks system emphasizes this rationing of food. The food training diet is very effective and will help you get 90% out of your birds motivation.

But what about the other 10%? If you really want to get 100% out of your bird, if you want more than just a bird who will wave/play dead, if you want a well behaved, well vocalized, happy, loving companion for life, you should use the social diets previously outlined. The reduction in daily attention that the bird receives will just make the interaction that it does that much more enjoyable. The limit of number of toys will make new toys all the more exciting. The withholding of petting until a favorable behavior is performed will make the bird learn acceptable behavior.

For every diet (food, social, petting, etc), there is an X amount that your bird needs to satisfy its hunger. This may be (hypothetically) 10 grams of food, 3 hours of attention, and 2x 20 second petting sessions. Any more than this may be bonus or may just be fattening and unnecessary. So for food, you would ration out 1 out of 10 grams to feed exclusively during trick training. For social attention, you would ration 3 out of 24 hours to spend out of the cage with you. Finally you would pet it twice that day when it is sitting quietly on its perch and not flying off.

Sometimes you can emphasize a particularly desired behavior by giving a bigger helping (of whatever diet you are using for that). For instance, I will let my bird stay out of the cage longer when there is company around because she is learning how to behave around strangers and to reward her for being good with other people. This will help the bird remember that other people are good, she gets to spend more time out. My bird has been prone to one-person-bird challenges but by giving her greater petting, attention, etc around other people, she is beginning to look forward to social outings more. As you may have read, I give my bird greater than usual attention when I take it driving or out on trips as a reward for the stress of being in the carrier and traveling. It would not even be possible to reward my bird with a food reward for doing this because she will often be scared and not eat or just eat a normal meal. That extra motivation for being good while traveling comes from all the bonus attention I give to her.

You can only use a particular motivator for as much as the bird wants. You can only feed a bird till it’s full, pet a bird till it’s satisfied, or keep it out of the cage until it’s tired. This is a great reason to use a variety of motivators and diets for your bird because when one runs out, you may still be able to influence your bird by using another. You can also use different types of motivators for different behaviors. A lot of these social motivators are very long term while click/treat is direct. These are both good for their individual purposes. A click/treat is excellent and pin pointing the exact way to hold the foot while teaching the wave trick. On the other hand, there is no real click for sitting on the perch quietly. This is where all of these toys, attention, and petting come in. While you may be able to do 50 repetitions of a particular trick using a food reward, you might only be able to do one or two rewards per day for sitting quietly. But if you do this over a long stretch of time, your bird will realize that actually being calm and quiet earns it attention more reliably than screaming and being a nuisance. In this case, food would not be such a good reward because the bird would not be receiving food for all times it is relaxed and also the bird may still be receiving food when it is rambunctious. But if you are limiting attention, talking, and petting to only a relaxed bird, it will soon catch on. Don’t give your bird food for not doing anything (being calm) because that will hurt your ability to get the bird to do something (a trick). Teaching it to be calm for food will extinguish its desire to try new behaviors that may lead to a trick for food. So reserve those non-food rewards for those calm behaviors and food for teaching tricks.

By rationing and rewarding your bird with everything it wants (and not only food), you can build a much stronger relationship. Not only will your bird learn better behavior but it will also be thrilled because it is receiving all this stuff from you and it knows exactly what to do in order to get it. If you pet the bird randomly, it doesn’t know how to ask. If you pet it when it is calm and well behaved and bends its head over to you, and you pet it, the bird will know what to do.

This all may sound very regimental but really it is quite simple. Give your bird what it wants only if it is giving you what you want. In turn your bird will only give you what you want if you give it what it wants. The bird wants food, you ask it to do a trick, it does trick, you give it a seed. If the bird does the trick wrong, you do not give it the seed. Apply the same thing to something like petting/attention. If the bird is sitting calm/quiet/relaxed you can talk to it, give it attention, pet it. If the bird is running around and screaming, you ignore it. So just remember, never to give the bird anything that it wants if it is going to be used to reinforce undesirable behavior but to hold it off until the bird is doing what you want.

Conclusion

A real “training diet” should actually be rationing everything that your bird enjoys and not just food. This way you always have something that the bird will try hard to earn from you. Whether that is food, attention, being left alone, time out of the cage, time in the cage, toys, vocalization, petting, training, or just playing together, you have full control over how much of that your bird can get. If you leave your bird always wanting more, you have the power to influence your avian friend about proper and improper behavior. If you give your bird too much, your bird will feel like it doesn’t have to listen to you. If you don’t give enough, your bird will be lonely, upset, and neglected. Finding the proper balance is key to a healthy owner to bird relationship. And it is this balance that will be the subject of the next article in this series about the healthy balance for birds.

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.

Non-Food Parrot Diet

Kili gets a balance of attention and independent play

I have previously written about setting up a food based training diet for your bird. While the food diet is probably the easiest and most effective for trick training, there are other kinds of diets (or rationing) that you can put your bird on to help with behavior. Basically you can ration anything that your bird wants (except maybe water & safety). By rationing something the bird desires, you can save some of that to grant as reward to the bird for behavior you seek to achieve. These behaviors may be tricks but food seems to work better for tricks because it is a concrete reward. Petting, attention, and showers are subjective rewards and hard to gauge. The rewards I talk about in this article are better suited for rewarding good non-trick behavior.

Social Diet

If you have a bird that is bonded to you and enjoys being with you, you can ration the amount of time it can spend with you per day. If you keep the bird out with you all day, then you cannot possibly reward it any more for desirable actions. So spending all day with the bird would be like keeping food in its cage all day. It will not perform behavior that you want in return for attention.

When I am working, I am not home most of the day and the bird is happy to see me and come out in the evenings. Even when I am home all day and have time to spend with my bird, I never spend the entire day with the bird out. Pretty quickly the bird would catch on to this and feel more independent of me and not really try to behave well to retain the privilege of staying out. There are behaviors she could do that would result in her getting put away so hopefully this limited time with me discourages her from doing them.

The above was for someone who’s bird as tame and wants to spend time with them. People with a new bird or a bird that does not seem to like them may find the opposite approach to be better. Keep the bird out a lot to get used to people and reward it for good behavior by putting it away into the cage and giving it a break. The fact is, you have to figure out what your bird wants (in or out of cage) and then ration that so it will behave more to your liking and make the most of its time out of the cage.

Another component of the “social diet” is that even when my bird is out of the cage, I don’t give her my attention for the full time. Part of the time she is out I will play with, talk to, and train the bird. But the other part of the time I will ignore her and go on the computer while she plays with the toys on her climbing tree.

Toy Diet

I ration my bird’s toys but not in the sense of keeping her without toys. Simply I keep a limited quantity of toys in her cage but rotate them out frequently. I never put more than 3 toys in her cage at once and usually keep it at 2. By rationing toys like this, she is always excited about a new toy. This keeps her busy but at the same time she wants to come out of the cage. A bird living with 10 toys (besides maybe being crammed) may enjoy all those toys so much that it won’t want to come out. Also, I keep the best toys on the climbing tree and not in the cage. This way my bird is always looking forward to coming out and playing with these toys. Usually these toys make more of a mess when the bird chews them up and they can be a little more dangerous, so I can keep an eye out when she plays with them.

Kili plays with her favorite toys on climbing tree

Vocal Diet

Although it’s a lot of fun hearing my bird talk, if my bird tried to vocalize all the time I’d be left with a giant headache. That is why I talk to my bird only part of the day. I know that movies, loud talking, and playing bird clips makes my bird more vocal so I do my best to balance loud times with silent ones as well. This way my bird can sit quietly part of the day but also has times to let loose and work off that vocal energy.

This is my Senegal Parrot’s first appearance in a video and I had only had my bird for about 6 months at the time it was shot. In the video she demonstrates 7 tricks: wave, shake, nod, turn around, bat, fetch, and bowling. That is greater than an average of 1 trick per month.

Also I had taught several other taming behaviors and established a regime. She also knew target, let me pet her, hold her in any angle, and open her wings to check feathers. I taught these tricks at a leisurely but consistent pace. Check back at this blog for more training tips.

You may have seen my previous post about my budgie going through a toilet paper tube. Well we took this trick one step further.

Now the budgie runs through a slinky as well.

This trick add on only took five minutes to train as he had already learned to go through various sized tubes.

This one is more exciting though because you can see the bird running through the slinky and because it can be bent in different directions as opposed to the straight tube. One time we let him run into the slinky and quickly bent the exit end and hooked it up with the entrance end and he kept going around in a circle a couple times till we let him out.

So if you have taught your bird to go through a tube, go ahead and try to find a slinky to add another trick to your repertoire without the effort of teaching a whole new trick. The bird should pretty quickly figure out that the slinky is just another tube to go through if it is already proficient at the tube trick.

Start by letting it run through a contracted slinky as a plain tube and once it figures that out, you can start expanding it for longer runs. If the bird isn’t picking it up, go back to the tube trick post and just use the same techniques to target the bird through the slinky. Please be careful and use two hands or get assistance for holding the slinky open.

If you let go of one end, it may spring shut and injure your bird. Be safe and enjoy.

Since we had already taught our budgie to jump through a ring, we wanted to take this a step forward and teach him to go through a toilet paper tube as well. The first difference between the ring and toilet paper tube was that toilet paper tube is more confining so the budgie was adamant of going through it at first. This was no problem however, because Duke had received all the requisite training to learn this trick and we had him go through the tube willingly by the end of the training session.

Prerequisites:

-Clicker conditioning

-Target training

-Jump through a ring training

So before training your parrot, you will want to make sure that it is proficient at the above skills. If not, you may want to go back and practice those a few times before proceeding to teach this trick. While it is not required that your bird knows how to go through a ring, it will make it easier that it knows how to go through something round as a tube is just a deeper version of a ring.

What you will need:

-Target Stick

-Clicker

-Treats

-Toilet Paper Tube

-Tape

If you are training any bird larger than a budgie, you can substitute the toilet paper tube with a wider diameter tube such as PVC. I used a 3″ piece of PVC for my Senegal Parrot because I could not find a suitably sized tube. You can also try an oatmeal can with the ends cut off or a wide roll from paper.

For your first training session you will want to tape the tube down to a surface so that your hands are free to control the bird, target, click, and reward. You may even want a second person to assist you because there are so many tasks required at first. In the video you will see that the clicker, target stick, and treat should all be placed in the same hand in order to liberate the other hand to hold the bird. If you are not used to targeting your bird in this way, you should refer to the blog post about Single Handedly Target Training Your Bird which teaches you how to do it.

Once you’ve prepared the toilet paper tube and taped it to the table, put your bird down in that area and let it familiarize itself with the tube a short while. You may get lucky and the bird just goes through it out of curiosity in which case you can click and reward. Most likely this will not be the case. Start desensitizing (aka getting your bird used to) your bird to the tube by targeting it near and to the tube. Once the bird is ok with being near the tube, you can target it to the entrance of the tube. After this point, place the bird at the entrance to the tube but insert the target stick from the other end of the tube. Stick it through the tube to come out on the end near your bird. As the bird starts walking to nip the target stick slowly start pulling it back and into the tube. Hopefully the bird will follow it all the way or part way through the tube. For this you should certainly click and reward. If the bird follows the target stick to the entrance of the tube but refuses to go in (as was the case at first with my bird), you are going to have to force it through the tube a few times for it to realize that it actually isn’t scary and that it will earn it lots of rewards.

Hold your bird in your hand at the entrance of the tube and stick its head in part way. Keep your hand behind it so that it has no chance to recede out the rear end of the tube. With your target stick (also clicker and treat) hand, show the target stick at the exit of the tube. Even without the stick, odds are the bird will just come through the tube toward freedom on the other end once it realizes there is no backing out. When it comes out the exit end, click and give lots of reward. You may have to repeat this a few times but pretty soon you will see that the bird is coming through the tube more readily. If this is the case, you can try to relax the hand you force it in with so it can choose to back out or come through the tube. If it backs out, don’t reward and try again. This will teach it that only coming through the tube earns a treat. After this stage, just place the bird at the entrance of the tube and show target stick on the other side. If the bird chooses to go around the tube for the target stick do not reward and try to place it closer to the entrance next time or block the way around the tube with your hands. If the bird is still showing improvement, you may be able to stop targeting through as it knows to come through the tube. Now in your next few training sessions you can start to place the bird farther away from the tube entrance and let it make the choice of running through the tube and not around. If it is not going through the tube, return to an earlier stage. If it is still making progress, try putting your bird at the side of the tube and let it figure out to come around the tube to the entrance side.

An extra tip for you. Don’t point the tube the same direction every training session and don’t have the bird alawys go through the tube the same direction (except the first few times as to not confuse it). If it gets too used to running right to left all the time or something like that, it may get confused if you turn the tube. So after you no longer have to stick the bird in the tube, use your free hand to hold the tube (instead of taping it) and aim the tube in different directions for every run.

Once your bird has mastered the toilet paper tube, you can try moving up to a paper towel tube instead.

Here is a video of my Senegal performing the same trick (not as exciting):