Update To Ricky's Training Sessions

WOW! I've trained a lot of parrot's to overcome their bad behaviors, but the power that constructive training, whether it be in a child, teenager, or hormonal parrot is nothing short of amazing. I shared with you earlier today how over the course of this last week, our Parrotlet, Ricky, entered into his first hormonal season. But that I wasn't worried, because I'd practice what I preach and had taught Ricky how to do two things... he is target trained, although I admit his attention span is pretty short. And Ricky is trained to crawl through an empty toilet paper roll on command... in fact we just got it on video a few months ago, and are thinking about adding the how-to footage to one of our next courses. But anyways... ... My point is that while Ricky was still a sweet little baby parrot I taught him who was boss, and how to follow instructions. Admittedly I didn't do this as much as I should have, but I knew that I wanted to teach him something before he hit the hormonal season, so we would have developed a base of communication that I could fall back on... and I had at least done that. I also shared how yesterday I made the decision that I was going to start training Ricky again, nothing much, just to relax and calm down instead of attacking the sides of his cage when I walked by. I did this with a few random training sessions throughout the day, where I'd give him a few rewards, and here I am writing this post to you at my computer with Ricky kindly sitting on my shoulder. The taming only took 1/2 a DAY! After a week of not being able to pick him up without Ricky making my finger bleed, a few targeting sessions when Ricky presented aggressive behavior throughout the day, did something inside him to remind him that he likes me, and that he's trusted me before and I've always rewarded him. Now I'm sure I'll need to do more training every day, I'm not saying he'll never bite me again, but I am saying that something about getting an animal to perform a trained task, no matter how small, while they are VERY upset, has DRASTIC impact, and often suddenly changes that animals behavior immediately. I've got some more examples I'll share with you of how this same principal works with training macaws that I'll share with you tomorrow.