13 Feb My Parrot Bites to Step Up! How to work with aggressive parrots
Abbi is a thirty year old blue and gold macaw that has one eye and a fused wing after being attacked by a pitbull and never having proper veterinary care. He also did not like women and clearly had a preference for men. When the local parrot education and sanctuary asked for our help to work with him so that he could potentially be adopted out to a wider variety of interested homes, we enthusiastically agreed.
Rehoming and Rehabilitating Macaws and other parrots
While working with rehabilitated macaws isn’t the focus of our work with positive reinforcement, it does go hand in hand with our parrot behavior consultations. We utilized consistent communication with everything that we did with Abbi so that he did not have any reason to feel confused or frustrated around us. We never sat next to his cage and talked or sang, we avoided putting ourselves in a situation where he felt like he needed to bite to get his point across. We did not offer to touch him until he looked like he would be amenable to it, and we were very careful to offer him food treats in a way that allowed for him to take them without biting. Our video series has been extremely popular for helping others to work with aggressive parrots, teaching them consistent, sustainable step ups.
Check out this informative, step-by-step three part video series on how to step your parrot up and even learn how to build a trusting, happy relationship with him!
You can check out more biting information in our podcast on Three Hidden Reasons Your Parrot Still Bites. There are loads more topics inside the Avian Behavior Podcast. Subscribe and check out our Patreon for more tips.
For more information and a really deep dive into more of our work with challenging parrots, join our online membership and follow along our work with Snowball the rehomed Umbrella cockatoo, who doesn’t have a lot of skills other than biting and screaming, Blue, a – formerly- egg laying blue and gold macaw, as well as our foster cockatiels. We have loads of courses that is ever growing to help you with multiple birds, how to deal with birds on the shoulder, harness training, and so much more!
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