Introducing Your Parrot to Harness Training

Harness training your parrot is not only a great way to be able to bring your bird safely outdoors, it is also a great way to build trust with your parrot! This video will help you introduce your parrot at any age or training level to harness training so that your parrot will actually enjoy being near (and eventually in) their harness. SO many harness training videos I've seen out there are on baby parrots, who put up with a LOT more than older birds. I didn't start harness training Petrie until he was over 2 years old, and while he is still learning, he has made AWESOME progress so far--and that's WITH the harness being a fear trigger! Stay tuned for Part 2!!!

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Time points:
Important background information: 0:24
Step 1: Desensitizing your parrot to the outdoors: 3:32
Step 2: Desensitizing your parrot to the harness: 4:28
Step 3: Desensitizing your parrot to being handled: 7:49
Step 4: Putting the harness on your parrot: 11:18

The Aviator Harness: https://theparrotuniversity.com/conte...

Notes on negative reinforcement (NR): I DO NOT mean yelling at your parrot! Please never yell at your parrots! This type of NR is unproductive and can be damaging to your relationship. By NR, I mean reinforcing a behavior by removing the object/stimulus (in this video, the harness). NR works in conjunction with a parrot’s natural response to want to flee or somehow influence (perhaps by screaming) situations that make it uncomfortable. Using NR can have BOTH positive and negative outcomes since the use of NR will always reinforce a behavior. Consider this example: suppose your parrot screams when a certain person enters the room and in response that person ALWAYS leaves the room. The parrot has now learned that it can make that person leave by screaming. Essentially, the NR here is the person leaving in response to the parrot’s reaction (the screaming). The same logic applies to always removing a “scary” object away from our parrots. However, we CAN use NR to our advantage to reinforce desired behaviors as well. In this video, I am treating the harness as a fear trigger because for Petrie, it WAS a fear trigger! Every time he saw the harness, he would scream and fly across the room. If my response to this was to always remove the harness from his line of sight, I would be using NR to my disadvantage. Instead, I never completely remove the harness, I only ever back up a tiny bit with it. Keep in mind that using NR to our advantage is almost never as good of a method as using positive reinforcement (such as the click and reward). This is why I click and reward BEFORE backing off with the harness a little bit. This way, the NR is only a secondary reinforcer to the primary positive reinforcement (the safflower seed).

Notes on the counting method: I absolutely LOVE this technique and use it in so many of my formal and informal training sessions with Petrie. HOWEVER, in hindsight, I wish that I had trained Petrie by counting DOWN to 1, rather than up to a certain number (in this video, 10). That way, Petrie would always know that when I get to 1, I'll click and he'll get his reward. This would be instead of him waiting for me to get to a certain number which can increase over time depending on his comfort level. If you'd like me to make a video on training with this counting technique, comment below!