Hello friends!
I know I've been on this forum before, and I've talked about my one person senegal. Unfortunately I took a shift that does not agree with Tengu, overnight. He's alone most of the day, he's started becoming self destructive, and his aggression is out of control. Obviously there's also a lot of screaming for attention, and over all I just feel terrible about the whole thing. I'm trying to have him spend two days a week at someone's house where there's five people who can come over and spend time with him. We've done this once, and he came back open to getting scritched by two people out of the five, I'm very pleased with his progress. Hopefully if this continues he'll be more socialized and less neurotic.
To complement this I acquired some training videos, all very positive reinforcement with bridging. One of the first tricks was step up, which I thought "Oh, Tengu knows this!" Queue me getting bit. So I started at step one, with dowels, one to step up, another to distract but not chew on. It was difficult, but he caught on quickly to stepping up without using his beak. A few minutes in he started trying to move away and yawning, so I backed off and gave him a break. When I came up and asked him to step up the first time he did it and got a high value treat, the second time he flew at my face. All he bit was a mouthful of hair, I put him back on the cage and tried to move onto another trick and checked to make sure he was still interested in the treats. He was very motivated, excitedly bobbing his head and doing 'wave' (he learned that one a long time ago and I use it as the universal: 'do you want this?') I moved on to "shake your head no", using the technique described which was to give the cue, blow lightly, and then reward. I did it twice before he flew at my face again. He didn't try to move away first or anything. This time he was much more determined to go for my actual face, when he missed he flew back around and tried again, basically dive bombing me. I caught him with a blanket and put him away, it was difficult, he was trying to fly off the blanket towards my face, not his cage. No screaming, by the way, or yawning, just straight up going after me. Before that he had seemed just as engaged as before. This whole thing only constituted maybe five minutes of training.
I am freaked out. We had a good relationship, I thought, but I'm not sure I can work with him like this. Should I get his wings clipped? Should I work on just building up his tolerance for training in general? How would I go about that? Is there a better way to go about deflecting his aggression? I'm worried I'm teaching him "get frustrated and attack and she'll put me back and leave me alone".