TakeFlight wrote:Thankyou for your reply Michael!
Do you allow your parrots to engage in food foraging for enrichment?
What r your thoughts on this being that you monitor their intake.
I have been under reccomendation. Thoughts?
Ok I know this question isn't for me but I would like to share how I manage food, fit in training and allow foraging with as much accuracy as anyone else who uses food management techniques.
Training is good of course but sometimes we are not always around and want to motivate our parrots to play with toys etc. in our absence.
Basically I measure out their total food allowance for that day in the morning and split it down into 4 parts. I have small birds so this is quite hard as their food intake is minimal anyway but it is do-able. The 4 parts is, breakfast, foraging toys, dinner and training treats.
In the morning I put their breakfast in and fill their foraging toys with the portion of food I have set aside for this, I leave the toys in all day.
In the early evening is the time I usually do any training, my birds very very rarely don't want to train despite the fact they can potentially eat all the food out of the toys right before training. I've only known Ollie refuse to train once in the past 2-3 years.
In the late evening approx an hour before bed they get their dinner, anything which hasn't been eaten out of the foraging toys gets emptied and put in with their dinner. I only use dry foods in the toys for this reason.
I would say by doing this we don't really get any more waste than any normal food management situation and I still get to weigh exactly anything that is left over at the end of the day.
Please bear in mind that I don't train my birds as intensely as Michael seems to, I don't train every single day, I'm not 100% strict with measuring out every single last crumb of food they get every single day and my birds are on variable schedules which means training sessions aren't always in the early evening etc. but this approach still works for me.