by Wolf » Tue Nov 25, 2014 1:21 pm
Zaura may not be eating as much gloop as you want her to but she is not starving and this is normal behavior as far as I know. I have been working with my Grey for many months, nearly a year and she still doesn't eat as much of her gloop as I would like and also tries to avoid most of the vegetables in it. My Grey's favorite nuts are almonds and pistachios and peanuts, the rest she really doesn't care if she ever gets one or not. It is fine that she will only trade work for those treats that she likes even if they are a seed as you don't feed them the food that is reserved for a treat, it is saved and only given as a treat. In almost all cases the food that they think of as a treat is one that is too high in fats and/ or protein, but the amount that you give them as a treat is not enough to cause them any problems or at least it should not be.
I think that perhaps you are pushing yourself and possibly the birds too much. It feels from this end as if you fell that since this process is taking the amount of time that it is that you are failing in some regard. If so then you need to realize that this is not the actual case as firstly the bird always sets the pace and they will progress only as fast as they have things figured out in their own minds. With what these birds have been through it is going to be a long slow process as we advised from the beginning. Relax, you are doing very well and have made more progress than you realize in this matter. You will earn more trust quicker by just hanging out and talking to them than by any other method that you can employ. You will have days and even weeks where you make a little progress from your perspective and then for no apparent reason it will seem that you are losing ground, but don't let it bother you as that is a part of the normal learning process. They learn things in much the same manner as we do but not quite the same. They learn until they hit a certain level and then it appears that they stop and/ or regress and then when they work it out in themselves they will start learning more. It is not so different than we do it. Relax and enjoy the birds they are really doing quite well. I have been working with my Grey for nearly a year, she still prefers her seed mix over her gloop and tries to hold off so that she can consume more of the seeds, and although she loves to be on me a lot of the time and gets mad if I leave the room without her she will still not do anything for any treat at all. This is not to say that she refuses to learn, because she does learn and at her own pace but just not for treats. She will allow a head scratch in return sometimes but mostly she just does it because she wants to.
The fact that Dino is eating his food much better will eventually get through to her as well because they do learn from each other much more readily than from a human.