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As I work on my new parrot training book for TFH, I find myself noticing training for better or for worse all over the Internet. The book includes trick training and training for husbandry and behavior, but I personally think the most important bits of the book are training the day-to-day. Right as I was about to write the section on training a parrot to take a bath, I noticed a video on Facebook of a scarlet macaw taking her first bath.
I hope the video owner will forgive me for not entirely approving of this method of “baby’s first bath” which is essentially here is how you take a bath, get over it. He is very gentle and careful and talks calmly to his parrot. Obviously he loves her a great deal and wants to help her with new feather itchies. However, she is not happy about her bath and may or may not be willing to get in the sink next time.
What do I mean by “not happy”? Explicitly at :19 she starts trying to get out of the sink. At :34 she tries again and when she is unsuccessful holds up a foot, wanting to try again, but not making a big attempt because she wasn’t successful on her last try. When she succeeds in busting free at :54 she definitely has escaping on her mind and beelines out of the sink. If you have ever heard me talk about watching for subtle body language that exhibits discomfort or fear, that is what I am talking about. Her body language is saying, “I don’t like this.” If the parrot finds the situation undesirable, then it is not training with positive reinforcement, because being in the sink and being sprayed is obviously not reinforcing. It is also not operant conditioning because the operator is clearly not in control.
Is she terrified? No. Traumatized? No, I think she is just fine. However, it’s now a crap shoot whether or not she is going to want to take to her next bath, because it obviously wasn’t rewarding. Behaviors only repeat themselves if they have been rewarded. Compare her experience to Blu Lu, Barbara Heideinrich’s parrot and her first bath which is entirely directed by the parrot.
When Blu Lu is uncomfortable, she is allowed to leave. I know not all of us believe in having our birds flighted. If she were unable to fly, Barbara would have just offered her a hand, when Blu Lu lifted a foot wanting to get away from the water and let her step back down when she leaned toward it again. The parrot can make the decision and discover for herself how she feels about bathing. What she discovers is that it is positive; look at her body language in compared to the other parrot. She is flicking and bobbing her head and dunking herself in the water voluntarily. Her body language shows engagement rather than a desire to escape. And when she does leave, she comes right back. The experience was positive and chances are it will repeat. There is no question about how she will feel about being near the sink or being offered a bath in the future. Perhaps she won’t jump right in, but it will only be because does not feel like having a bath, not because she is nervous or fearful.
So you can train a parrot with operant conditioning to take a bath by allowing her to reinforce herself, or if you have a reluctant parrot, you can be the giver of reinforcement and shape the behavior. Those step would look something like this:
Leave the water running in the sink and step your parrot on the counter. (You may have to do some repetitions on and off the counter if your parrot is uncomfortable with standing on it.) Once your parrot is comfortable sitting on the counter train her to bath by shaping the behavior for rewarding each step progressively:
Reward for looking at the water. (She looks at the water, you say “good” hand her a treat.)
Reward for getting closer to the water.
Reward for getting right next to the water.
Reward for touching the water.
Reward for getting beak all the way the water.
Reward for leaning all the way into the water.
At any time, if she is uncomfortable, she can back out or quit all together and you can pick up your training session again later. And once you get her going to the water on her own you can ask her to step up and position her with your hand so that she can move all the way into the water for rewards. Pretty soon you have a parrot that has learned that bathing is fun and enjoyable and getting into the water will likely be its own reward.
Sure, a lot of us have learned how to swim by being thrown into the water, but who wants to learn that way when you can just as easily put on your floaties and slowly the test the water on your own? Life should be a self-explored adventure, not a task that is forced on us. Those of us who have found our way by exploring and being in control are well- adjusted and on the look out for fun. This is similar for all animals. So give your parrot a chance to delight in the simple things in life, like taking a bath!
A snippet of the parrot training book I am working on…
Imagine that your parrot is an alien dropped into your home from another world. Actually, this is pretty close to the truth.
Parrots don’t have lips and cannot smile. Their strange little pupils expand and contract with their thoughts. Overall, they have strange expressions that do not make sense at first, expressions mostly based in the rise and fall of feathers. They communicate in clicks and beeps. Their locomotion is even different from ours. It is hard to even imagine what it would feel like to travel through the world on wings, but they do it and in the wild make it look easy. You may as well have E.T. in your living room. (If you haven’t seen the movie E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, you should definitely rent it.)
Yet, despite the fact we must seem just as alien to them, we assume parrots understand our words, motions and sometimes even our thoughts. So where would you start if you found yourself having to share your home with an alien you wanted to communicate with, have fun with and teach how best to live with you? If it were E.T. you would coax it into interacting with you with Reece’s pieces, train it how to integrate into your home without making too much trouble, teach it to talk, learn everything you could about the species and then work on some awesome tricks together. (Who wouldn’t want to ride a flying bicycle?) You should skip the candy, but working with a parrot is not all that different than working out how to live with E.T.
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