Clicker Training - can't get to step one.

[Pajarita]

Thank you for the vote of confidence but I have to tell you that, in my personal opinion, it's not the best approach to parrot keeping. Personally, I think everybody should question EVERYTHING and EVERYBODY regardless of how good and logical they sound or what credentials they are supposed to have. I've been doing this a loooong time -even before there were birdsites on their own and the only places you had to ask and answer questions were bird clubs, bird stores where breeders would congregate to talk and compare notes, and Yahoo groups (does anybody remember these?). I have learned not to trust anything people write on the internet. It's the perfect venue for people to lie without getting caught... Let me tell you a story. About 10 years ago, when the birdsites started becoming popular, there was this lady who said she was a bird lover and a rescuer. She had a lot of beautiful birds, posted pictures of them all the time and answered everybody's questions so she was highly regarded by bird people to the point that she was considered, by some, a bird gury and a bit of a sacred cow. I did not like her because she pooh poohed on the solar schedule and the fresh food diet (two things that I firmly believe in!) and we did not agree on whether parrots were happy as pets or not. Well, a couple of years went by and, one day, we found out she had dropped dead of an aneurism while shopping. Her husband asked for help placing all the birds she had and a rescue that I networked with (I used to run my own bird rescue) went to pick up half her birds. The lady had two rooms with birds, a front room and a back room. The front room had all the good looking birds she was always posting pictures of but the back room was, in the words of the lady from the rescue, a little shop of horrors! It was filthy, full of old rusted cages with sick, plucked and self-mutilating birds!

Anybody can say: "this is what it is" or "this works for me" but how do you verify if this is, indeed, true unless you do your own investigation? You can't. And that's why I always tell people NOT to take mine or anybody's word for anything, to do their own research going to reputable, verifiable, scientific sources (not any Tom, Dick or Harry on the net) - when in doubt, go to nature and see how she does it and if there is still a doubt, just don't do it.

[Wolf]

There are no experts when it comes to parrots and there is a tremendous amount of old outdated information competing with the new information not to mention the differing myths and outright misleading information. You are well advised to listen to what is offered but then take the time to research it yourself and then decide what you think that you should do. Treat the things we say as suggestions, but no more than that.