Parrots & Wing Clipping

Video Transcript

"Hi my name's Elizabeth and I'm speaking on behalf of expert village and what I wanted to talk to you about today is the importance of wing clipping when training your bird. Now most the time I don't recommend wing clipping but when you're first starting to work with a bird and develop a relationship with that and animal and specifically try and teach him some tricks what you want to do is you can go get a professional wing trim done or look it up. You want to fairly conservative and make sure that when you do trim their wings they have enough flight to not hurt themselves if they fall down in attempts to escape or just when they're frightened. The reason is that most of these birds if they decided that they're tired of a session or you want to work with them in other places you're gonna spend a lot of time chasing them down when they decide that your sister in the other room or something out the window is more interesting than your training session it sort of helps focus their attention a little bit on you and on the session. After that go ahead and let their wings grow out it can teach them, you can start worrying about advanced behaviors such as flying towards you and that sort of thing. In the beginning I do find that it is a little bit easier to train a bird if you trim their wings before hand. Some birds if you've got a bird like Missy where you don't need to trim their wings at all but in particular with budgies and cockatiels and lovebirds it's very, very hard to hold their attention if they can simply just fly away and look for food and attention somewhere else."