How To Stop Your Parrot From Biting In One Day!

Oh... the sweet smell of VICTORY! I don't know about you and your personality, but this whole parrot training thing is addictive to me. I just love it and can't get enough of it. And hands down... my most favorite part of training a parrot is that breakthrough moment, when you've been training for days, or weeks, and the bird finally starts to get it! WOW... I love that feeling. There's nothing like finally connecting with an animal that was not put on this earth to communicate with me, wasn't given the ability to speak my language, and yet here we are, face to face, speaking a similar language and developing a relationship, and a bond. It's a bond that has two way communication. The parrot lets me know when he wants to do, or not do things, I train him acceptable ways for him to do so, and then I train him, signals that let's him know when I need him to do something for me to! And the REALLY great side benefit of all this is that for some reason, I'd SWEAR it's a UNIVERSAL law, that whenever you take a living being, be it an adolescent child, your spouse, a dog, horse, cat or in our case... parrot, and improve the level of communication between yourself and that other being, an amazing thing happens! The relationship is ALWAYS strengthened. It's never failed to work for me... every time that I've taught an untrained parrot his first trick, he started biting me less. And when I taught him his second trick... he bit me even fewer times! Well, throw another point on the board for this theory, because I've proved it once again. Three days ago, I shared with you what I wanted to do with my Parrotlet, Ricky, and how bad he had become, and how I was going to basically treat this blog as a live journal, and talk you through everything I trained Ricky that day. I thought it would be a week or two process... Boy was I wrong! I'm hear to tell you that it took one day. That's it! Not more or less. One full day of random clicker training sessions, while the bird was presenting bad behavior was all it took to cure Ricky of his biting, during this peak in his hormonal cycle. But I do want to make two points that I think are the reason Ricky was able to make such quick progress. The first is that I didn't let the problem go for more than a week. I took action quickly and didn't let a bad habit form, and get out of control. And the second reason requires a guilty admission before sharing it with you... I'm LAZY! Yep, that's right, I bought this little bird, he was cute, he was little he was a baby, and such a sweet angel that I was happy enough with his behavior that I didn't feel I needed to train him to do a bunch of things. After all... he was a little Angel. But! I'm not stupid, and I realized that the reason he was an angel was because he was a baby, and that the day was coming when my little baby would grow up, and start showing some bad behavior. So even though I didn't train him every trick in the book, I did do one thing... I target trained him. And to be honest I did teach him one trick, but only one... to crawl through a paper towel roll, but that's it. I did this because I wanted my parrot to have some level of communication with me, even it it wasn't much so that when tough times came, I could fall back on our basic understanding of what targeting was, and use it to handle him when he got temperamental. And I think the results speak for themselves. Don't ever think you don't have to train your parrot. Doing so is foolish, and a pipe dream, if you ever want to have the best relationship possible with your bird.