Sorry I did not answer your post earlier, Tman. I did not see it.
I believe in teaching animals that live with use skills or commands that will benefit their lives or protect them in some way. For example, all my dogs know a large amount of commands but they are all things that are useful to our living together so they don't know to 'roll' or walk on two legs but they all know that 'Move' means they need to move to another spot, which is not the same as "Out" which means leave the room, or "Move over" which means get the hell away from me and lay down at the foot of the bed 'cause you are crushing/crowding me
Few of them fetch properly but all of them know "Drop it!", "Give me" and "That's not yours" (first one means for them to spit out whatever they have in their mouth, second means bring it to me and third means don't try to steal something from another dog and, if you wait, I'll give you something - not the same as "Leave him/her alone" which means not to bother the other dog or "Don't touch" use mostly for my food - but there is also "It's mine!" which means you won't get any of this no matter what. See what I mean, useful for most dogs but absolutely necessary when you have a large number of them.
My birds know commands and phrases, too, but no tricks. They know things like "Step up", "Step down", "Be nice" (when one of them is pestering another one), "I'm watching you!" (when one shows a mild degree of aggression to another bird), "Go home" (for the ones that 'invade' another bird's space or the handicapped ones that need to be put back in their cage), "I'll be back" (for when I have to leave the birdroom when I am still not finished -it prevents their screaming when I walk out), they know what 'water' means as well as 'hungry', 'peanuts' (all seeds and nuts are peanuts), 'cookies' (birdy cookies), 'pan' (birdy bread), 'good bird', 'bad bird', etc. Lots of them know to come when I call them, too. Useful things all as you can see. I don't consider a trick a useful thing to teach to a bird. People say that training is good because, this way, the bird gets to spend more time with them but, in all honesty, if your bird learning a useless trick is what is required for you to spend a couple of hours with your bird, you should not have a bird to begin with.
I like training because one would think that people learn to pay attention to the bird's body language and moods when they interact this way but I don't like the trend I am beginning to see more and more of people just acquiring birds so they can train it to do tricks even before they bond with it and that does not bode well for the poor bird because no matter how enthused we are at the beginning or how much we achieve with our training, even the most spectacular and awesome trick becomes commonplace after a while and we will want either more -which the bird eventually will not be willing to give us- or give up entirely and where does that leave the bird then? I tell you, I've been doing the birdsite thing for years and years now and have not only seen a boom in parrot ownership (with the consequence of more and more birds been abandoned) but also a giant switch in bird-keeping mentality where birds are not kept because we love them but because of what we can get out of them and I am convinced that unless you have no expectations of a bird aside from it been a bird, you should not keep one. Marc Johnson once said that people should only acquire a bird because they want to give the bird a good home and not for any other reason and I agree with him 100%.