|
|
©copyright 2001-2008 Ken Globus
All Rights Reserved
Reprinting or distribution of any
material from this web site is prohibited without
the written permission of the author
|
|
|
By Ken Globus
|
For years I've used the term, "hands-on," to describe my
approach to bird taming.
 It's
a pro-active approach used to desensitize birds to the
things they are avoiding. On the other side of the
coin are the “patience” people, who believe that you must
wait for a bird to do everything on its own terms, and "come
around" in its own time. What if "in its own time"
turns out to be never? Sometimes waiting, being too
sensitive and passive can make your bird more fragile and
actually increase its sensitivity. When patience is
getting you nowhere it's time to take action with a hands-on
approach.
Keep in mind that this method is not aimed at teaching
"tricks" to birds that are already tame. Or taming
birds that are only slightly wild. The birds I'm
talking about are biting, fleeing and avoiding contact.
In other words, they’re living in constant fear of humans.
And their owners have been unable to make progress with them
with all the "patience" in the world.
In some cases the birds had never been tamed. In
others, they were once hand-fed babies that, because of
improper handling and the owner's lack of techniques, pulled
away from their human companions and gradually became more
fearful and aggressive. This unfortunate pattern
repeats many, many times.
Every time I do a program around the country I ask the
audience for a show of hands of who had a tame bird that
they now can't handle. The majority of them raise
their hands, which illustrates how common this problem is.
|
Progressive Desensitization
|
In order to tame a bird, you first have to get it out of the
cage. The Patience People are against taking even this
step, which renders the owners helpless. I do this by
gently maneuvering the bird out even if it doesn’t want to
come out. This enables me to expose it to the
situations it is avoiding (coming out of its cage, perching
on my hand, doing step-ups, being touched, etc.) long enough
to realize that those situations are not dangerous. In
other words, through a process of progressive, systematic
desensitization you can help birds become comfortable with
the very things they have been avoiding. The bird’s
afraid of hands? I gently expose it to my touch and
very quickly it discovers that my hands won’t hurt it.
Aside from being direct, the approach has to be gentle and
calm. Never get excited, move quickly or raise your
voice no matter how wild, aggressive or noisy a bird gets.
|
"Seeing is
Believing"
Here's a good example of
how progressive desensitization works. Ken helps this Macaw move from
biting and hand-shy to calmly enjoying touch in
just a few minutes. Photos by
David Howell from a Tri-State Avian Society
workshop in Tallahassee, FL You can read David's
article, "Seeing Is Believing"
Read Article
|
Don’t forget that birds occasionally bite. If it happens to you, don’t be
insulted; it’s nothing personal. And don't feel like a
failure. Even tame birds occasionally bite. We
frequently see birds nip at each other. That’s how
they communicate things like, “This is my perch," or "Let's
get outa here!"
So, here’s the all too familiar chain of events where normal
bird behavior develops into problem behavior and the
relationship between bird and owner spirals downward.
At a given moment for a reason not always obvious, your bird
bites you. Ouch. This makes you wary. You now
move your hands more tentatively. Trying to avoid your
bird’s beak, you might offer your finger (or hand) a bit
lower down for the bird to step-up on, perhaps near its
feet.
 The
bird doesn't feel secure stepping onto that lower perch.
Birds don’t like to step down. Or, it feels that your
finger is attacking its feet. So, it “beaks” your
finger either to test it as a perch before stepping up, or
stop it and push it away. Or it outright bites.
But now you're afraid of the bite, so your finger wavers, or
jerks away, making an even more precarious perch, which
causes the bird to trust it/you less. So, the bird
tests that weak perch even more emphatically by biting
harder. Now you jerk your hand away. Normal human reflex.
And you’re even more nervous. Your hand movements
become more erratic, which, to the bird, appears very
threatening. So, you offer your hand even lower and
more hesitantly. Or you’re afraid to offer it at
all. And so on. And so on.
This is how the fear level between bird and owner typically
escalates. It turns what was once a warm and friendly
relationship into one of mutual fear and mistrust.
Your bird is now on its way to becoming hand-shy and
aggressive and you’re on your way to becoming bird-shy.
My handling approach was developed through dealing with
birds during the days when they were mostly wild-caught
adults, and extremely aggressive. These were birds
that were terrified of humans. If you got near their
cage they would throw themselves on their backs, squawking,
flapping, screaming, ready to fight for their lives. I
tried leaving them alone and found that that did nothing to
calm them. Every time you got close to them the
pattern of fear would be repeated.
Because my techniques were developed in a vacuum I had no
preconceptions. I had never seen anyone tame a bird.
But sometimes, ignorance can be the mother of invention. I
was forced to be creative, to figure out on my own, a way to
get these birds to calm down. I glanced at some of the
books on taming, but none of what they described seemed to
make sense when working with the wild-caughts.
Patience just wasn't going to get anywhere.
And the only teachers I had were the birds themselves.
By observing how they reacted to the things I did, I learned
what was effective. And they let me know every step of
the way.
The biggest breakthrough came the first time I got three
larger birds at the same time - three wild-caught,
adult Umbrella Cockatoos. After I got them back from
the quarantine station, I would take the first Cockatoo out
to trim its nails and clip the wings.
 During
this grooming the bird would be fighting and screaming
bloody murder. Remember, these birds are convinced that I’m
out to destroy them. After the grooming, I put the
first bird back in the cage with its other, un-groomed pals.
Later, I noticed something very interesting: when I
approached the cage the other birds were much more afraid of
me than the one I had groomed. Even though I had just
subjected the bird to the rough handling of a grooming it
was now less afraid of me than the ones I hadn’t yet
touched.
So, what did I conclude from that? That because the
bird had been exposed to a vulnerable situation and survived
it unharmed, it began to realize that I wasn't going to kill
it as it had thought. The others, which had not yet
had that experience, were still much more afraid of me.
This was the key that began to unlock my thinking about
assertive handling techniques: expose the birds to
what they're avoiding and they become less afraid of them.
Many of the birds I deal with today are nowhere as difficult
as those wild-caught adults. It seems to me that most cases
now have to do with a bird’s normal tendency to seek what
they perceive to be the "easy way out," and develop some bad
habits that cause them to pull away from their owner.
Or, it’s a case of miscommunication between owners and
birds, with the result being a gradual pulling away and the
increase in the mutual fear level.
Many people consider a hands-on approach to be
controversial. They believe that anything that exposes
birds to an increased amount of stress should be rejected;
no matter how little the stress and how short the duration.
My approach does expose birds to a temporary increase in
their stress level, but so does a visit to the veterinarian
or a grooming. Yet we consider those things to be
necessary evils, for which it is worth exposing birds to
stress. Why isn’t helping a bird come out of its
fearful state considered as important as a grooming? I
think it is. In fact, I think it's vital.
The short-term stress of this pro-active approach is much
kinder than the long-term stress experienced by birds and
owners who live together for years in mutual fear.
Imagine being in an environment where you live in constant
fear that your captor, some 50 to 100 times your size, may
at any moment kill you.
 In
another article ("Taming Older Birds") I relate the story of
Nigel, the 25 year-old (at least) Double Yellow headed
Amazon that had lived his entire life in fear of his owners.
How stressful is that? Nigel felt like a prisoner in
his own house, always on the alert, always frightened,
backing away, growling, threatening, biting, when anyone
came near him. In Nigel’s mind he was certain that his
demise could take place at any moment. And this went
on for 25 years! Is this a way for a bird and human to
live together? I think it’s cruel. When I worked
with Nigel, he went through a half hour of stress until he
reached a point where he realized I wasn’t really a threat.
It was as if a switch flipped in his brain and he suddenly
became relaxed, trusting and wanting human contact.
The stress he had lived with all his life, more than 25
years, was gone and a new relationship had begun.
If I had waited for Nigel to volunteer to come out of the
cage in his own time, on his terms, another quarter century
might have passed. Yet, using progressive techniques
of systematic desensitization, I exposed Nigel to the things
he was terrified of, and now he's living without fear and aggression.
|
|
|
|
