17 Oct 22 To Clip or Not To Clip Your Parrot
The concept of leaving your parrot flighted or clipping its wings is a huge topic with much debate. There are many opinions going both ways based on health, safety, welfare, and psychological benefits...
Blog
05 Oct Target Training a Toucan and other Grab-and-Bite Animals
Target training is referred to often as a basic behavior, the first one we teach when we are working with an animal. It can be particularly helpful when working with animals that are particularly sensitive, reticent to engage, shy about taking food from us, or...
14 Sep 21 Conversation With Paige Davis
In this broad conversation, Paige Davis, a curator at the World Bird Sanctuary in St. Louis, Missouri, and I sit down and talk about bird of prey training, falconry, species differences, weight management, and social media. We covered a lot of ground when it comes...
04 Sep 20 Myths in Raptor Training
You know I love a good myth-buster series. At the risk of going down the road of talking about what people do wrong instead of how to do it right, we look at a few practices that circulate raptor training circles in both falconry and...
24 Aug 19 Myths in Companion Parrot Care
There are lots of myths and easily perpetuated narratives about how we should care for and manage our parrots and their behavior. Many of these narratives are not rooted in science or academic information but something that is worse (eep! sorry scientists): that which looks...
16 Aug Donkeys vs. Flies – Positive reinforcement training in action
by Katie Pnewski Fly season is upon us, which our mini donkey’s aren’t a huge fan of, more specifically Louise. Louise is allergic to flies but she is also reactive towards fly spray. This is very common among equine species like horses and donkeys. The familiar...
14 Jul 18 Anthropomorphism and its Impacts on Our Relationships With Animals, Training, Conservation
Anthropomorphism is assigning human like qualities to non human things. This can be animals, planets, plants, even computers. Anthropomorphism isn’t all bad, but it’s important to understand how it influences things like our conservation choices (choosing the cute animal over the less cuddly one, regardless...
07 Jul 17 Grief, Empathy, and Animal Relationships
In this episode, we speak frankly about death and the loss of an animal. We talk about the body’s response to emotional pain and research that discusses animal-human relationships. We also discuss some complicated topics about empathy, accountability, and responsibility in the animal world, for...
27 Jun 16 Are You Stopping Problem Behavior or Solving it?
In this broad reaching podcast, we tackle the problematic way we solve behavior problems that is still so prevalent on community forums in social media. This podcast gives three important questions for you to ask and enact right away that will help you vet and...
26 Jun 15 What Makes Owls Hard to Train?
Owls are iconic, mysterious, and deeply ingrained in our culture. They make important conservation ambassadors, albeit challenging ones. Our Masterclass on How to Raise an Ambassador Owl focuses on how to work through the specifics of these challenges as well as why this makes a good...