- Welcome back to part two.
If you missed the first video,
we left off where we realized
that we had to teach Monty how to be calm on cue.
- Which can be pretty challenging with a military macaw.
They're one of the harder species
in our experience to work with.
But I think even the hardest species (laughs) was Ze
and also getting her to realize when she was triggering
this over-heightened behavior in Monty.
So I would say that was even harder to un-train.
- So are we trying to train the military macockatoo
or the human here?
(laughing)
- All right.
So Dave kind of initiated this session
to see if we could start out with the right calm demeanor.
(laughing)
But we got Ze.
So we all know--
- Love you, Ze. (laughs)
- We all know how that went.
We love you, Ze.
- Set us up for success.
I just want everyone to be chill. (laughs)
- [Ze] So leave?
- No, you can just stay there.
(mumbles)
(clicker clicking)
Good.
He's going for my thumb.
- [Jamieleigh] Really?
- Yeah.
That, or he's just,
yeah, there we go.
Went for my thumb twice.
(clicker clicking)
- [Jamieleigh] Looks like a pretty gentle--
(Monty screeching)
- No, he's not taking the treat yet.
- [Jamieleigh] Really? (laughs)
- I know.
I don't want you to bite me.
Here, I'm gonna put it here.
There ya go.
(Monty cawing)
Okay, come here.
- [Jamieleigh] Is that him?
- Oh, he acts like--
- [Ze] Ready?
- Hey.
- [Jamieleigh] (laughs) Seriously?
You call that calm?
(calm electronic music)
(Dave and Jamieleigh laughing)
- I think we just found the problem.
(Jamieleigh laughing)
So I wanna try an experiment.
I wanna have you be just out of view
and want you out of view for like two minutes.
Then Josh, I wanna see what your interaction looks like.
And then after each time he does a click and a rep,
I want you to step into view,
and the next rep step a big step closer,
a big step closer,
and I wanna see at what distance your presence
changes that (background noise drowns out speaker)
On your own, he's fine,
you said, yeah?
You guys wanna try that?
And so let's just do targeting through the cage.
I'm guessing he's gonna be more receptive to you.
If we start this and he's not receptive,
then we'll just stop for a bit.
In a master class we did down in Salt Lake City, Utah,
or Sandy, to be specific,
at Ronie's For the Love of Birds,
we noticed that this one military macaw
didn't respond to food
and we had a small three- to four-hour window
to train this bird and in that period,
we were able to train the bird to do a spin on cue
without using a single treat just by us cuing people
to move and enter and exit the room.
So in this situation,
I thought I'd kinda revert back to that
and try a little experiment by involving both Josh and Ze
and kinda manipulating the situation
to where we used a little bit of loss of a reward.
- And it can show you how your behavior
truly influences the behavior of your bird.
And one thing that I want you guys
to all really pay attention to is listen to Monty.
He is heightened and you can tell by his vocalization
after every single repetition.
- And this is why in the family friendly parrot formula
in our entry level course,
why we really stress that each and every single interaction
is a training session.
You're either increasing good behavior
or increasing bad behavior.
Look what we're about to do.
(clicker clicking)
- [Dave] Nice and gentle, so.
(Monty cawing)
He's more receptive to you than he was with me.
(clicker clicking)
- [Jamieleigh] See him using his tongue?
- [Dave] Yeah, and he's not shaking his head.
(Monty cawing)
All right, so Ze, go ahead right there.
(clicker clicking)
- [Jamieleigh] Still looks really nice to me.
- [Dave] All right, so take one more step forward.
- [Josh] Oh, I missed the--
- [Jamieleigh] Don't treat, don't treat.
- [Dave] Step back, step back.
- So I wanna preface this
with I didn't have the right camera angle yet,
but I promise that's coming
and we do show you like the entire room perspective.
But to start,
it's just this initial up close with Monty
so you can really see how his behavior changes
as Ze gets closer.
So keep in mind,
Ze and Dave are on the other side of the room.
Dave is telling Ze how close to move in or when to back off
and I want you guys to be able to pay attention
and see how that is actually influencing
Monty's behavior towards Josh.
- So to start this experiment out,
I wanted to make sure that we were getting calm targets
on cue with Josh so that again,
going back to what we talk about a lot,
we're pairing that emotional state
at the time that that behavior's happening.
So while he touches the stick,
since target had been previously very calm,
we want to really cement that into Monty's mind
that calm and Josh,
that's all kind of going to be the same thing.
So we started with Ze around the corner,
and every time Josh would click and give a treat,
then we would have Ze take a small approximation,
a small step forward to where just her head's visible
and then a little bit more of her body was visible
with each and every single successful repetition.
- Then we added another layer to this,
kind of a different dynamic,
and every time Monty started to be aggressive towards Josh
because of having Ze now in that room
and in that environment,
we actually started to back Ze up.
So any time Monty was aggressive to Josh,
now it was equaling Ze getting further away, as well.
So we were kinda doing a combination.
There was just an added layer
to the dynamic of this entire session.
- So one of the things that a lot of people overlook
is that they think that when their bird talks,
it's really cute because the bird loves them,
or some other human emotion that we assign to it.
Well, the reality is that most birds learn to talk
at a heightened emotion.
Doesn't always mean they love you.
Sometimes it means that they hate you.
So when they say hello or goodbye or,
I won't say it here as family, - Come here.
- Family show,
but they might swear at you.
But usually talking behaviors
are a heightened state of emotion,
or in this case,
could be a sign of aggression.
(clicker clicking)
(Monty cawing)
All right, so she's taking one step into view.
Yeah.
(clicker clicking)
Yeah, so it's nice and calm.
(Monty cawing)
All right, you wanna take a step in.
Okay, so before you go into his bubble,
wait for calm body language.
- [Josh] Okay.
- Which is right now.
(clicker clicking)
Nice.
(Monty cawing)
Take another big step.
Okay, so wait for calm body language.
Which this is not.
Okay.
(clicker clicking)
(Monty cawing)
Huge part of me is saying stop right now.
That's one of those moments in my head I'm like,
"This is great.
"Let's get one more."
Done, done.
I've learned that so many times now.
So, that was improvement.
- Yeah. - Right?
- All right, so I know this doesn't look
like a ton of progress,
but keep in mind,
before we got here for this in-home consult,
they could not interact with Monty
in the same room together,
so it was a really big deal to get this achievement
where Ze was even just a little bit in the room
while Monty was basically interacting
with Josh in a positive,
calm way and not showing those aggressive behaviors.
- Two things I wanna point out.
One is that when they did have Monty out
and Josh entered the room,
Monty would slide down the perch,
jump off the perch and chase him out of the room.
And if he didn't retreat,
he would just tear him apart.
So the second part I really wanna point out
is we did the training in the cage
because we can really control how aggressive Monty is
because he can only reach so far through that cage bar,
which limited the amount of likelihood
that Josh would get bitten
or that there would be an aggressive behavior
paired with him learning these things,
and also just gave us the control of the situation
to set us up for success.
- And keep in mind,
this was session one of three.
So we only got a total of three sessions in this day
and this was only the progress from the first session,
so super excited to show you guys what happens later.
But while giving birds breaks in between sessions,
we talk concepts and we talk training
and we just talk all the things,
especially plans for after we're gone.
And so I thought that you guys would really enjoy
hearing some tidbits from that.
All right, so I thought this next part
was also a good reminder for those of you
that haven't heard us talk about the birdie bubble.
We obviously don't talk about each and every concept
in each and every video,
so you kind of get tidbits from each video.
But the cool thing was
you also got to hear how this training,
what it's gonna look like
when it progresses outside of the cage
'cause I know that a lot of people
are probably gonna get a little wrapped up in the fact
that this is happening with the bird in the cage
and how do you get past that,
how do you eventually let Monty out?
And so I wanted to make sure
that you guys got to hear us touch on that.
- Then the last thing,
you've probably heard us talk about the birdie bubble.
- Yep. - Mhm.
- Have you heard about this at all?
- [Josh] A little bit, yeah.
- So the concept is, like,
we're having a conversation,
we're training, we're training, we're training.
Okay, we're no longer engaged in that conversation.
And so if you're like,
if you got the target stick and you're like,
"Yeah, but hey, so next time do this,"
the bird's gonna,
especially this one,
you're done.
You get one failure,
you're done.
He'll start climbing down.
So if you're gonna have that conversation,
you gotta step back
and like have the brief conversation 'cause he's...
You'll lose him fast.
- Okay.
- So I think really the solutions right now
are getting us through the cage.
And then once we get it to where
you can do this gently through the cage,
which we should make,
I'd love to see today having you be like here.
You know, and we might even get that
because it's gonna be more drastically progressive
when you totally leave.
It's gonna sink in more.
- Okay.
- But then I think we'll be able to get him
to the point where once he associates that you training
means his favorite ward's either entering or leaving,
he's gonna get good fast.
You're about to watch the second session of three that day.
Now, we realized early on in the day
that we weren't going to get
a lot of repetitions out of Monty,
so we had to approach this a little bit differently.
In most of my one-on-one consultations,
whether by video or in person,
I always say whenever you hit a failure point,
go back to where you were last successful
and rebuild the steps from there.
But today knowing we would only get two,
maybe three sessions,
I had to play a little bit differently.
So this time I wanted to start where they left off
and that's a lot further ahead than we would normally do.
So we sat down and we had an action plan
for if he does worse,
then here's what we'll do.
If he does better,
we'll push as fast and as hard as we can
within Monty's limits,
not what we want,
but what Monty's willing to accept,
and you're gonna be shocked by what you see next.
- This was literally the highlight of everyone's day.
- [Dave] He looks engaged.
(clicker clicking)
(Monty cawing)
Just a subtle tip,
when you're giving a treat,
try not to have the stick in that same hand.
- Okay.
- [Dave] Over time, with an adult bird,
if they think, "Target or treat, target or,"
you can lose them 'cause they get pissed off.
- Okay.
(clicker clicking)
(Monty cawing)
- [Dave] Okay, so go ahead and take a big step forward.
Yeah, all right.
Hold there.
- All right, so earlier,
I talked about how we were changing up the dynamic
and adding some layers of putting Ze forward as a treat,
but also removing her if Monty was ever aggressive to Josh.
You will notice I sped up this session
so that you guys could really get through it.
However, we only had to back Ze up one time.
The rest was progression.
Like, look how close we got Ze to Josh to Monty.
The whole thing, I mean,
that progress was like just amazing.
We were so, so happy.
(calm guitar music)
(clicker clicking)
(background noise drowns out speaker)
- [Ze] I give a treat?
- Go in there.
In training,
it's always important to leave the bird wanting more
and one of the best tools you have
is by giving a huge reward.
However, knowing we would have a third session,
we didn't wanna give a huge jackpot reward,
so if you go back
to what our family friendly parrot formula talks about,
just understanding what the quadrant is about,
I thought what the heck,
let's go ahead and give the number one reward,
the highest reward better than any treat
that Monty could have,
and that was letting Ze go give attention to him.
Cool.
You guys are both really intuitive to his subtleties.
Huge improvement from the first rep where it was like,
he's like, "I'm okay, hate you,
"I'm okay, I kill you."
You know, and now you could actually get up
almost shoulder to shoulder.
So as you can see,
this second session was awesome.
We killed it.
It was phenomenal.
And it was huge steps forward,
again, looking back to what their regular interactions were,
they couldn't even both be in the same room
without Josh being murdered by this bird.
So that was session two.
I wanna hear what your thoughts are in the comments below
on what you think's gonna happen on session three.
- Stay tuned to find out!
(laughing)