Giving parrots control

[Feathered Antics]

I have to disagree, birds do not have to be hungry for food to serve as a reward. Granted, they should not be on the verge of bursting, but if a bird is too hungry, that can hinder your training as well.
I sometimes train my greys right after they've eaten, especially with my youngest who is crazy about anything edible. They can still do a 15 minute training session without a problem, simply because the treats used are very high value; tasty and never available outside of training. (You know, dessert-belly
When we do husbandry training (stationing, scale training etc) with our troop of seven lorikeets at work, we use the exact same nectar mix that they have free access to all day long (including during sessions) and we've still never had issues with them not participating. They love training and to be served from syringes, simple as that!

Birds can choose not to participate from a wide range of reasons, and one should consider this before resorting to making them more hungry. Of course there's nothing wrong with a bit of hunger; training just before a meal for example. All birds are individuals, some are extremely motivated by food, some less. There are many ways to increase food motivation, including many that don't involve increasing their hunger!

 

[GlassOnion]

I believe that proper food management calls for training sessions in a time frame, during which a parrot feels just an adequate amount of hunger to be motivated. Not starved and physically healthy, but hungry enough to work for food. Just as a hungry parrot will fly and forage for food, a hungry parrot will train and perform behaviours for food from the trainer (owner).

If I gave Ruby food whenever she wanted, she would feel very little incentive to work with me on desirable behaviours, harness training, and even foraging on her own. When I leave her in her cage during the day, she gets a small plate of mash, and the rest being skewered veggies, pellets, nutriberries, nuts will have to be foraged in order for her to be full. If she weren't hungry, she wouldn't be motivated to forage as much as she does, thus being very bored. This is a bird who has history of barbering from the stress of being in a cage, and I have no doubt that if I didn't make her forage for her meals, she would continue to self-destruct.

 

[BraveheartDogs]

I just wanted to point out that doing something over and over does not guarantee habituation, in fact you can cause sensitization where the animal actually gets worse. Depending on the level of fear, the individual, the training history, the reinforcement history, etc, all can influence how the animal may react. For instance, I have two cats, that have habituated to the garage door opening and closing, just from it happening, over and over. I know many other animals that experience the same (seemingly) level of fear response to some things. I choose not to train by using force. Of course, I sometimes have to do things that one of my animals doesn't like and in most cases I desensitize them to this through systematic desensitization, sometimes I just pair the exposure with something they like in order to counter condition them. And, sometimes, I just have to do it and get it done and hope that my relationship with the animal and reinforcement history helps to get them through it, this is, of course, not my first choice, but it has happened. My first choice is to use positive reinforcement and not force to train acceptance to something. No matter how I do it, I am ALWAYS measuring future emotional responses and behavior to make sure that things are going int he direction that I want them to.

 

[LaSelva]

"Control is a primary reinforcer, to deprive an animal of control is akin to depriving them of water, food"

I couldn’t find much on this on her website aside from where she speaks of empowering parrots. Which, of course, I agree with - that animals should have or feel that they have control. But as an interesting comparison here’s a quote from Temple Grandin:

“The single most important factor determining whether a new thing is more interesting than scary is whether the animal has control over whether to approach the object. Animals are terrified by forced novelty. They don’t want new things shoved into their faces, and people don’t either. But if you give animals and people a new thing and let them voluntarily decide how to explore it, they will.”

　
But I think that herein lies my issue, in the quote…”to deprive an animal.” And it illustrates why I enjoy the science of ethology. And that ‘s because it relies on medical proof - anatomical, physiological, chemical, and neurological, for the thoughts and behaviors of animals. It’s a growing science with more and more studies constantly being done. For example, anecdotally we might guess what causes stereotypical behavior in captive animals. Temple did a study that showed that a barren environment caused abnormal dendritic growth in pigs and that this was responsible for their stereotypical behaviors. But my point is that I think that Susan Friedman is generalizing. Which, is ok to do when applying animal “training" principles such as operant conditioning. Becuase the methods (ABC's of behavior/ABA) work accross species. And that's what she seems to work with...in other words, "learning." She's a child psychologist by education who also trains animals. But generalizing is not sufficient for the broader field of behavior (of which learning is only a part) becuase it has a huge biological component. Not all animals are equal in the mechanisms I mentioned above and it affects everything from how social they are, details they perceive, what motivates them (whether social praise in dogs, etc.), how high is their fear or stress, how sensitive they are to rough handling, and so much more. For example, the size of the frontal lobes of a human, dog, and cat differ greatly. And this has a very real impact on their capabilities when it comes to thought and behavior, for example, in controlling fear and rage once they set in. This could be why a bird clamps down on it's owner when something frightens it. It cannot rationalize the rage quickly enough.

In ethology there are usually specific studies to back up any conclusions. And if speculative comparisons are made across species they are made carefully and rely on similarities (homology) in the anatomical mechanisms for those behaviors. I’d still love to read the study you mentioned on rodents. But I think it’s important to note that any comparison to birds has to be carried out in the way I mentioned above in order to be considered. Remember, we either truly know something or we don't. In general, when we combine science with anecdotal experience and our own theories, we are making up pseudoscience. Beliefs based on aneddotal evidence change all the time. At one point people had plenty of anecdotal evidence to back up their belief in the "height dominance" theory and many others.

 

[Naiera]