- [Dave] Parrots are the third most popular
pet in the world,
but the number one most rehomed.
Help us put end to this,
listen to the Parrot Train podcast
brought to you by Bird Tricks.
- ♪ Bow-bow-bow-bow-bow. ♪
- Hey everybody, welcome to another session
of the Parrot Training podcast,
I'm your host Dave Womach here with Jamie Womach,
and as you know, we are from Bird Tricks.
Where today we are going to be talking about
over-treating.
When you realize that you may be giving too many treats,
because we get asked this a lot,
you look at our Family Friendly Parrot Formula
and that whole course talks about
how you should have a breakfast,
you should have a dinner,
you should do treats during the day.
What happens if you give your bird way too many treats?
- I'm out of breath, just listening to you.
- Yeah me too, that was a mouthful.
- All right, so the thing about this
is that it does change.
For example, we follow what we say in the
Family Friendly Parrot Formula on a daily basis
when we are home.
Now, when we are traveling, it gets a little bit crazy.
- It's muddied.
- And then when we are on free flight trips,
treats are making up probably an entire meal
on our flight trips. - Yeah, it's a lot.
- Now, to our birds defense, they are exercising like crazy,
they are earning those treats.
So I don't feel that bad about it,
and I know that our birds aren't getting
an abundance of treats outside of free flight trips.
- And also our free flight trips
are for two to four weeks, once or twice a year.
So we aren't the people that free fly from our back porch
every day where our bird is getting
half of its meals from just seeds and nuts
- Everyday. - everyday.
So that's a really clear distinction here,
based on how we choose to free fly.
- I'm glad you said that actually.
Because, yeah, I think a lot of people are wondering,
when does it become over-treating?
And I think that it really depends on your lifestyle,
for us I don't feel like the free flight
counts as over-treating because like Dave said,
it's only a section out of our year, out of our lives.
But, I do feel like if 50% of your birds meal
was treats, everyday.
Ooh, we got a fatty.
- It'd be a fatty.
- Yeah, that's overweight.
That's way too much, and that hard,
because people that do free fly everyday,
obviously they wanna use their treats
but for one of our free flight students,
Dave had to say,
"You are allowed 20 pine nuts, and that's it."
And she about died, it was the most hysterical
consult I've seen in my life. - She's like, "20! How..."
And then I think we dropped down to 10,
and then we had to have an intervention
where a friend went over and busted her
for not doing it.
Because what had inadvertently happened is
she had put her bird on to all seed and nut diet
and she recognized it when she was like,
"Oh my bird's not eating chop anymore,
what's going on?"
And, it's because she was just way over-treating.
- And it was accidental, so it was accumulative,
and she would treat for getting the bird to step up,
she would treat for getting the bird
into the travel carrier,
she would treat when she got there,
for the bird staying happily on her hand,
for doing the flights,
for going back in the carrier,
for getting home.
And it was just, that was part of her day,
and it was becoming so constant
that there was no random rewarding implemented,
which was the major downfall of that entire thing.
There were no jackpot rewards really given,
I think those were just kind of just pushed
in to the overall thing,
they were no longer special.
So, it was a lot of mixed messages for that bird,
it was a lot of clean up.
- Yeah, so some kind of ways to work around that,
and we talked about this
in Family Friendly Parrot Formula number two,
and that is variable reinforcement,
and this is a more advanced technique,
but, I'm going to kind of skip through it a little bit,
so we can touch on the bullet points
and you'll have a little bit more of an understanding of,
"Hey, there is a solution to this."
So, if you're the type of person
who wants to free fly everyday,
you're going to start using
FR3, FR4, five, six, FR10 potentially.
And we never recommend going that high,
however, if you keep in mind
that every single thing that this student was doing
was a trick, step up was a trick,
it was getting a treat, that's one behavior.
Then she would put the bird over here,
that's a second behavior,
doing this, three, four, five,
maybe go do a flight, return, that's six behaviors
she was getting six treats.
Where right now, we would want probably
just the one treat for the flight.
Or, we may even spread it out
to where it's every other flight.
You don't want to spread it to far, for a lot of reasons,
you want to avoid which is what we call
and extinction burst, where you get rid of the behavior
but not necessarily for the better,
cause you could make it so your bird
never wants to fly again.
And so, if you wanna go more in depth
on variable reinforcement and FR1, two, three, four, five,
all of those types of things,
that's something that we can go through with you
on an individual basis
but I do want to let you know
that there are alternative options to over-treating,
there's solutions for it.
- And I think also kind of having a plan.
So when people get birds
and they wanna create a bond through using food
because the bird doesn't trust them yet,
I think a lot of the times
you're worried about over-treating in the initial phases,
and that's legitimate,
but at the same time you have to realize
that's just like a temporary stepping stone
to get where you want your relationship to be.
So, a lot of the times when we first get a bird,
I know that I'm gonna be using a lot more treats
in the beginning that I will have to be using by the end.
And that's just kind of part of the journey
and something that you need to realize
and maybe just put a lot more emphasis
on the overall rest of the diet
but realize if it's temporary,
it's something that I'm willing to give kind of a pass for,
because it's for the greater long term good of that bird.
So it's not like your planning on doing that forever,
it's just the phase that you're at right now.
- The other thing that really worked for the student
was by really dialing her back to 20 and then 10 pine nuts,
made her plan her training session that much better,
it was more specific, more precise,
and she got a higher performance out of her bird
because she was pre-planning,
"Okay. I only have 10, that means I'm probably
am not going to treat you for stepping up,
I'm probably gonna need to give you one or two
for going back in your crate,
so that means I've got eight left.
Okay, how many flights can I get with eight treats?"
And she had to be very specific,
and she ended up having cleaner
and better training sessions
because she was forced to have to really think through,
versus just going till the bird quit because it was full.
- And I remember she got more specific too,
of realizing how many of the free flights
were taken on the bird's own choice,
and the bird just took off
and did a flight because it wanted to,
so that's self reinforcing.
So do you really need to follow it up with a treat?
Maybe not, if the bird takes off from a T stand,
and lands back on the T stand, I wouldn't reward that.
Obviously the bird did that because it wanted to,
and was reinforced.
Now, if I asked the bird to fly from my hand
and it comes back to my hand,
you might surprise the bird with a jackpot reward.
So, it just really got her to pay more attention
to what the bird was offering and doing
and which of those behaviors was either self-reinforcing
or reinforcing in another way other than the treat.
Maybe the bird wanted to step up
because it wanted to get head scratches from her,
maybe it just wanted to be with her.
And so she was able to look at all the outer reinforcements
as well, that were outside of food
that were playing a role
that maybe didn't need a second reinforcer of the food.
So it just made her relationship a lot stronger,
it made her communication a lot more clear,
and I feel like the respect level of the two
met in the middle,
versus the bird kind of was taking advantage of her.
- Well, and she was getting a lot of bad behaviors
from her bird because the bird was getting so much
reinforcement, the value of the treat went down.
So how does this apply to you if you don't free fly?
And you have a bird inside your home,
and you're worried about the fact,
maybe you are over-treating.
Well you'll know when the value of the treat
starts to be less and less and less.
It means you're probably giving way too many,
just like if you're always giving your kid pizza,
there's no special event,
like you know if you win a baseball game
and you get the pizza, that's kind of like,
"All right, cool team, let's work harder
to win the games so we get the pizza."
But if you got it everyday,
there's no incentive other than
hopefully you want to win the game,
but there's these other,
I remember doing that with our team,
every time we'd win back in grade school,
we'd get to go out to a little local place
that had pinball machines and pizza
and it was a really neat reward for us
but we didn't do that everyday.
So again, looking at your treat value and assessing,
is it something where you're giving so much
that it's losing it's value?
And if that's the case, you're losing the ability
to be able to train properly with your parrot.
Because we, again, we don't use food as a primary motivator,
we use the value of the treat as that motivator,
so if the treat means nothing,
you're shooting yourself in the foot.
- I just really want pizza.
(laughs)
Like really bad, now that you said that, I'm just like,
"I'm starved, I have to have it."
- And she hasn't had it in a long time.
- Really long time.
- Case and point.
- Sorry, I got nothing.
I'm so hungry, now that you said that.
- Well I guess we'll end it there,
and go order her some pizza.
So if you guys are getting value of these podcasts,
please like it, share it, leave your comments,
and most importantly, send it to a friend or family member
who's going through a problem with their pet parrot,
because our goal is to save parrots one person at a time.
And through distributing this,
and getting the information out there
and just telling people about Bird Tricks,
we're able to have a bigger impact
on pet parrots all over the world
- Oh oh oh, I have something.
We just added a freebie to our website recently
and it does have a bird food pyramid.
So that will help you as well keep track
of which food groups get fed in certain percentages,
and sorry, I just wanted to contribute
because I felt really guilty for only thinking about pizza.
- So you talked about the food groups.
- Yeah. Is that helpful?
(laughter)
- Where do they go on the site to find that?
- You can just head to the site,
and it's under freebies,
because it's a free digital download.
And yeah, it's really really helpful
because it talks about just the different cooking methods
and all the different things from healthiest
to unhealthiest,
and will give you a good idea.
And especially the first sign,
is that your bird stops eating the healthy foods
that you normally give and is holding out for those treats.
So just be really weary and cautious
about how often you are giving,
and those will kind of be like those little signs
to let you know that something's off.
Sorry, I waited till the end to contribute.
- Now if somebody wants to order Jamie some Pizza Hut
gift cards for her birthday, it's coming up in August.
- I was thinking Domino's.
- Domino's.
- But it's fine, I'm not that picky.
But I'd prefer Domino's
(laughs)
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