Why to Avoid Punishing Parrots

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Elizabeth and I am speaking on behalf of Expert Village about training your parrot and specifically I want to talk to you about negative reinforcement and punishment with parrots. Negative reinforcement is any activity that you do that makes the bird want to continue a behavior. For instance, if Karen didn't want to step up and I pushed on her chest forcefully. What that would do is that would be a negative experience for her. I pushed on her chest and she was forced to step up on to my hand. That's negative and I need to make sure that immediately afterwards I offer a positive experience. But what that does is encourages her to do a behavior that I want. So that is negative reinforcement. Now punishment discourages any behavior that you want. For instance, if he is screaming, punishment would be to covering the cage for five minutes with a blanket or something to take away stimulation. The problem with negative reinforcement and punishment with parrots is that birds unlike many other animals have a great memory and they do hold personal grudges so if you were the source of negative interaction with this animal on any level the will remember it and you can destroy very quickly your relationship with that bird. They won't want t be near you, they won't want to work for you, they won't want to have anything to do with you. These guys are flock creatures and if there is a member of the flock that is not treating them well they'll just avoid them. So their going to find someone else in the family that they like better than you. It's just not a good way to train a bird, the better way if you want to get these animals to respond to you is to find a way though positive reinforcement to get the behaviors that you want. Either by treats or taking them somewhere where you want to go. If a bird is being noisy you can take them out and give them some exercise flop them around the room so that when you put them back in their cage they are too tired too, you know, continue with the excessive vocalization. You can try hiding food in their cage so find some way to distract the animal instead of using negative reinforcement or punishment with parrots."