by Michael » Tue Mar 02, 2010 10:33 pm
Bit of everything. They do it as a warning too. They'll lunge at each other and bluff bites and give that off as a warning. You should observe multiple parrots to learn more about that. I'm sure folks here with multiple parrots of same species can explain the flock dynamics in greater detail.
However, the reason you cannot teach your parrot that something is off limits is this: basically there are 5 forms of operant conditioning you can use:
-Positive reinforcement
-Negative reinforcement
-Positive punishment
-Negative punishment
-Extinction
You cannot use positive reinforcement to not do something. You would have to be reinforcing 24/7 except when bird does wrong. So that's out. Same with negative reinforcement. So reinforcement cannot be used to make the bird not do something. You can teach alternative behaviors and positively reinforce those but there is no guarantee that the bird will still not do the unwanted behavior unless one completely overrides the other.
Now we come to punishment. If you use positive punishment, the bird will hate you. If you inflict pain or discomfort on the bird it will become fearful of you and you will not be able to teach it anything because you won't be able to get close enough without it flying away or biting in self defense. Negative punishment is taking something good away. This is generally hard to do. You're not going to take your bird's food away and starve it for being bad. A timeout is a common method of negative punishment, however, I have found it pretty ineffective. By the time you get the parrot back to the cage, it forgets the behavior that triggered being put away. It just remembers the last thing that happened... YOU putting it away. So punishments hurt your relationship with the bird and just make it avoid the punisher rather than not doing the unwanted behavior. So when wild parrots squabble with each other, if one parrot is stronger and hurts the other parrot, that other parrot just avoids the bully rather than avoiding "bad behavior"
This leaves us only with extinction as a tool for dissuading unwanted behaviors. Extinction can be achieved by two means:
-Prevention
-Flooding
What I mean is you can either make sure the parrot never has the opportunity to do the unwanted behavior so it will soon forget it (this may mean not wearing earrings any more or never letting it on your shoulder). The other method is flooding the bird with so much of the experience that it gets tired of it. Basically you let it get it out of its system. Take a pair of non-toxic ear rings that you don't need and let the bird have a blast with them and get it out of its system. Ignore the behavior, do not reward it or react to it. You can only hope that the bird doesn't want to do it any more. Of course you can also achieve extinction by allowing the behavior to go on and just ignoring it completely. This is what we do in the case of young birds being nippy. We ignore the nips and once their curiosity is satisfied and since there is no reaction, they don't nip any more.