Chapter Three: The Most Important Step In Bird Training.
Training Diet—The Key To Happy, Healthy Birds.
This chapter is all about how to establish your bird on a training diet.Before you panic, a training diet is not a starvation diet. In fact, you’re
not really feeding your bird less than you normally do.
What you are doing is making sure that your bird is healthy and motivated to train. In this chapter
we’ll discuss what a training diet is.Why you should put your bird on a training diet, and how to do
it successfully.
What is a Training Diet?
Assuming that your bird is on an organic pellet based diet, a training diet is simply portioning your
bird’s food from one or two large meals to two or three smaller meals.You save the snacks and yummy stuff for training time and you train before meals—when hey’re motivated to take food from you. It is different than a standard leave the bowl of food in the cage all day
kind of diet, because the amount of food your bird receives is controlled on a daily basis. It follows two basic guidelines:
1.It must be SAFE.
2.Treats are saved for training.
THIS IS NOT A STARVATION DIET!
How A Training Diet Works
Your bird is an animal plain and simple. As such, he is motivated by
food—generally. (There are a few rare exceptions but we’ll get into
that later.) A training diet works by making your bird want to work
with you because you have something that he wants. Not something
that he needs now or he’ll die. Something that he wants.
You need to give your bird a reason to do what you ask him to do. It
works, regardless of whether you have a bird that avoids you or wants
nothing to do with you or a bird that already loves you. It gives birds
with problem behaviors a reason to get along with you.
Your bird, on a training diet, wants to eat more than he wants to run
away and he chooses to perform the behavior you’ve asked him to.
I know that sounds rather harsh. It isn’t. Realistically, it is much
more gentle than that. Follow the steps to the T and your bird will be
happy, healthy, and training well for you in no time.
WARNING: Be careful about getting a bird on a training diet that is
overly restrictive. You don’t want your bird to associate hunger with
training. You want him to be hungry but not starving.
Being too hungry tells your bird that starving is part of training, which
makes him refuse to train. Not good for him or you.
Training Diet Step One: Weigh Your Bird, Every Day
Before you can weigh your bird, you need to have a bird scale. It will
have a perch for your bird to stand on and will weigh in ounces, grams,
and pounds. You can find a good bird scale at many online pet stores. A
quick search online will provide you with tons of options.
Once you have your scale, weigh your bird every day to see weight fluctuations. Chart them so that
you can tell if your bird has lost weight and if so, how much. More than a 10% loss in weight is not
good. Measuring daily ensures that you can.
1.Make sure that your bird is healthy, regardless of whether you’re training them or not. The first symptom of illness is often weight loss. We’ve saved three birds because we weigh them every day.
2.Make sure that you are feeding your bird the proper amount to maintain a healthy weight. That your
training diet isn’t too stringent.
Training Diet Step Two: Structured Feeding
A training diet works by reducing the amount that you feed your bird at meal times and then filling in
the gaps with treats at training time
For example...Let’s assume that your bird normally eats 10oz of fooda day.
(This is a number chosen simply because it makes the math easy it is not representative of what you should feed your bird. Consult with your avian veterinarian to find out how much your bird should
eat every day.)
So, assuming that we’re working with a bird that eats 10oz of food a day, we’re going to cut his food intake by 10%. So now he’s getting 9oz of food each day. Training works best if you divide that 9oz
into two or three scheduled meals a day depending on how often you can train your bird. We’ll work
with the assumption that you're only able to train twice a day.
This means that your bird now gets 4.5oz of food twice a day. Make sure that the times you feed your
bird are regular, so he’s eating 4.5oz in the morning and 4.5oz at night. Just before each meal, set aside a few minutes to train your bird. He’ll be hungry because he hasn’t had any food since his last meal, and he’ll be motivated to train. You make up the 10% that you cut out of your bird’s diet by feeding him treats at training time.
That’s it in a nutshell, however there are some things that are very important if you want your training
diet to work.
Things You Must Get Right.
1. Your Bird Must Be Ready
Make sure that your bird is ready for training and a training diet. He has to be willing to let you come near him. He doesn’t have to be a nice bird but he cannot be a violent or aggressive bird. He can’t hate you.
2. Save Treats for Treat Time — Pellets Only.
I recommend that you pick out everything that your bird loves to eat and that you save those favorites
for training time treats. If you feed him the treats during meal time them they’re not really treats. To
discover what your bird’s favorite food is, place a wide variety of foodstuff in your bird’s bowl and
watch what he chooses. He’ll eat his favorites first. They don’t really believe in delayed gratification. Dessert comes first.
3.Make Treats Easy to Consume.
The treats you feed your bird need to be able to be eaten quickly. Some birds are slow eaters. This doesn’t work because by the time he’s done with his treat, he’ll have forgotten why he got it. You want him to perform the behavior and eat the treat right away.
Shell the nuts and seeds. My Senegal parrot is a very slow eater. I have
to cut a sunflower seed into three pieces to make it small enough to keep
the pace of training high, or to get enough repetitions in.
4. No midnight snacks!
Your bird cannot be able to reach the bottom of his cage and eat from the tray. Many cages have trays that are close tothe bottom of the cage. This means that any food your bird knocks out ofhis bowl, he’s able to reach down and eat later. He won’t train if he isn’thungry.
5. Don’t restrict water.
Make sure that your bird has access to fresh, clean water at all times.
6. Weigh your bird at the same time every day.
The best, and easiest time, is first thing in the morning before training. Keep a chart or journal near by so that you know if your bird is losing, gaining, or maintaining his weight. You don’t want your bird to lose more than 10% of his weight. If he does, then you’re withholding too much food. Don’t dothis, it’s cruel. Make sure he’s healthy and he’s getting enough food.
What To Do If Your Bird Won’t Take Treats From You.
The goal is to get your bird to take rewards from you, that’s the point of
the diet however, some people tell me that their bird doesn’t like treats
and would rather receive affection, like a pat on the head, for a good job.
• First, make sure that you’re following the training diet steps to the T.
• Good treats are a must! Make sure that you’re giving him a real treat.
• Make sure that you’re following the diet and that he is hungry at training time.
• IF your bird still prefers other options, then it is possible that you’re moving too quickly training your bird when he really isn’t ready for it. IF he’s scared of you, he won’t take a treat. He doesn’t trust you.
• He may also not be in a good environment – too many distractions equals poor training. Your bird needs to be in a zero distraction environment.
Caution: If you’re going to relocate your into a quieter area for training, getting him from his cage to his training environment has to be a pleasant experience. If it isn’t, your bird will think only about the terror of transport rather than the fun oftraining. You’re essentially training him to hate training. Make sure the transport to another area is pleasant.
Treats are significantly easier rewards than playing or petting for training. If you want your bird to
begin favoring reats over petting or playing then you’ll need to train your bird to like them more.
Don’tworry. It’s possible!
Here’s how...Let’s take the example of a bird that prefers to get let out
of his cage rather than a treat. Your first step, once you’ve eliminated
all other causes for this preference like distractions and a proper training
diet, is to pair the action the bird wants—being let out of his cage—with
eating a treat.
Open the bird’s cage, but do not let your bird out of the cage. Give him
a peanut or sunflower seed or whatever kind of food he likes best. As
soon as he eats the treat, you let him out.
Repeat that 10 times a day spacing the treats every hour or so. If you do
this for a week or two (sometimes longer), he’s going to realize that he
needs to eat a treat to get out of the cage.
He begins to associate value to the treat. Eventually, believe it or not,
he’ll start to value the peanut as much or more than being let out of the
cage.
This strategy has been proven with dogs, mice, and even dolphins. Dolphins can be trained to value the cut up pieces of fish their trainer offers them over the fish that they can catch in the open sea.
They did this by training the dolphins to associate the cut up fish with
games that the dolphins enjoyed.
Dog trainer experts use this for dogs too. In fact, you can pair anythingand can get them to value anything more than their favorite reward.
You can even have the reward be negative and have your animal work
for the negative reward just as hard as they would for a positive reward.
Scientists have proven this by training mice to work for a pellet. Once
the mice were trained to push a lever to receive a pellet, they added a
mild shock to the lever. The mice worked through and adapted to the
shock because they valued the pellet. As the shock level increased, the
mice continued to press the lever and receive the pellet. Eventually themice chose to receive very aggressive shocks in order to get the pellet.
The next phase of the study was to remove the pellet from the scenario.
SO the mice pushed the lever and all they received was a shock. They
found that the mice worked very hard just to receive the shock.
What they then found was that when they introduced a different medium into the mice
cage, a chain hanging from the top that produced a shock when touched, the mice
worked to touch the chain and receive the shock—without a food pellet
reward. They had learned to value the shock more than the pellet.
Kinda crazy, but true.
Back to bird training...you want to train your bird so that he values food
treats over other rewards. When you’re beginning this process of pairing treats with behaviors that your bird does want like being let out of his cage, you do not want to work with your bird for to long in one session.
Once you recognize that your bird understands that he has to eat a peanut before he gets out of the cage, he’ll begin to work for that peanut. Make sure that you keep training sessions short, especially in the beginning. Some birds have a short attention span and you may only get yourbird to repeat the
behavior one or two times. They need to be both food motivated and interested in training.
You can gradually build up the amount of time your bird trains. If you train too much they’ll begin to
resent training and lose interest. Keep aneye on your bird’s behavior and body language.You can also
make early training sessions about behaviors that your birdlikes to do, like bob his head or puff out
his feathers or other natural behaviors like spreading their wings. This makes them associate fun with
training and that’s always a good thing! For example, my bird Magoo
lost his desire to train. I had been overtraining him and he flat out refused
to train. Realizing that there were behaviors that he enjoyed, I decided to fo
cus on those. With several clickers placed throughout the room and in my
pockets and treats always within easy reach, I waited.
Magoo, happened to be a bit hormonal at the time and enjoying his silhouette
cast by the lamp on the family room wall. He would stare at the wall and flash
out his wings so they were spread out like a big eagle. Looking at the wall he
would then stand there and admire himself. It fascinated him to see the shadows
flash up on the wall.
I decided to focus on this behavior. Each day, for the hour or two in the eve-
ning that I was watching TV, I’d sit there and wait for Magoo to flash his
wings. Whenever he’d flash them, I was ready with the clicker, a treat, and a
cheer. Magoo is a cockatiel and he loves exuberant cheering. Like it is with
any trick and any bird, the first time, second time, third time, and event the tenth
time, Magoo no idea why he was earning a treat.
Eventually it got to the point where Magoo realized that if he wanted attention,
he'd just cast out his wings and look at me expectantly for his treat. Magoo returned
to enjoying our training sessions it changed everything. Not only was he willing to work
because he was doing something that he wanted to do but he tried harder and I learned to not
push him so hard.
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