Pickles The Parrot Returns: My Continued Adventures with a Bird Brain (21 page)

Step 1: Describe the behavior in observable
terms.

Veda widens her eyes, tightens her grip on
her perch, pulls her body back and waits in this position for a
second or two. If I don’t move my hand she bites it hard.

Step 2: Describe the antecedents.

Any time I walk up to Veda’s cage, I greet
her to let her know I’m there. I open her cage door, slowly put my
hand in front of her and say, “Step up, Veda.”

Step 3: Describe the consequences.

I remove my bitten hand (hurt and annoyed),
and Veda stays in her cage. Case, or should I say
door
, closed.

Sep 4: Examine the antecedents, the behavior,
and the consequences in sequence.

Any time I walk up to Veda’s cage, I greet
her to let her know I’m there; Veda widens her eyes, tightens her
grip on her perch, pulls her body back and waits in this position
for a second or two. If I don’t move my hand, she bites it hard. I
remove my bitten hand (hurt and annoyed), and Veda stays in her
cage.

Let’s stop her for a minute to examine the
insights that resulted from this analysis, as it helped me clarify
several important things. First, far from being a biter or having a
biting
problem
in any chronic or
generalized sense, I learned that Veda displays a very specific
set
of responses, in a specific location
with a different antecedent than I had originally assumed. Before
analyzing the ABC’s of Veda’s biting heavier, I had not realized
that she tenses her body, pulls away from her perch and widens her
eyes in a valiant attempt to warn me to withdraw. How
remarkable!

In this light, it becomes so clear that the
critical antecedent to her biting is not my putting my hand in her
cage; it’s ignoring her non-aggressive communication, requesting me
to remove it. Only when I ignore her communication and persist does
she resort to biting. So, who set the silver balls in motion this
time, Veda or me?

It is also evident that by withdrawing my
hand and leaving her in her cage, I was in fact reinforcing the
biting. With each of these interactions, I was unwittingly, but
explicitly, teaching Veda that biting is an effective and necessary
way to get my handout of her cage; apparently so, since warning me
non-aggressively did not work. I’m sure she would say it was
nothing personal but that I was quite … dense! Can’t you jus hear
her explaining this to our baby cockatoo? “Listen up, baby. No
matter how kind and gentle you want to be, these humans respond to
one thing and one thing only, aggression. Why, it’s a jungle out
there!”

Step 5: Devise new antecedents and/or
consequences.

After careful consideration of my options, in
this case I chose o change the antecedents to decrease Veda’s
biting. First, I no longer say, “Step up!” when I want her to come
out of her cage. Instead I ask her, “Wanna step up?” If she
displays the warning behaviors, I take that as an unqualified “No,
but thanks for asking!” and I calmly remove my hand from her cage.
I then leave her cage door open, allowing her to exit how and when
she chooses. As an additional strategy, I trained her to step onto
a perching stick for those rare times when staying in her cage is
not an option. We practice stepping onto the stick a few times a
week, for which she earns an avalanche of praise and kisses.

Step 6: Evaluating the outcome.

Changing the antecedents to decrease Veda’s
biting has been a huge success. Of course it is not surprising that
she no longer bites me – by heeding her warnings, I don’t give her
the opportunity, or the reason, to do so. I continue to present my
hand to her and ask if she wants to step up. If she tenses her
stance, pulls away and/or widens her eyes I remove my hand and go
on to other things (you know, like cleaning cages and changing
water bowls, uh-huh)

What has been
very
unexpected is that after a few moths of letting her decide how to
come out of her cage, she now rarely declines my offer to take her
out on my hand, choosing instead to step up nicely and hitch a
ride! Who knows … maybe the freedom of choice was important to her
or she benefited from more control over her own destiny; perhaps
her trust level increased when I lowered my apparent dominance.
These are all very interesting possibilities.

Closing Thoughts

In my opinion, we generally focus on
consequences to influence behavior. This is especially true of
negative behaviors that we want to decrease or eliminate. In this
way, we limit ourselves to rewarding our punishing more or less.
One of the exciting benefits of this simple analysis strategy is
that it fosters careful consideration of the antecedents, that is,
the things we do to promote … or provoke … behavior. Antecedents
should be brilliantly arranged to ensue that the appropriate
behavior is facilitated. Doing so makes selecting consequences easy
– when the appropriate behavior is facilitated. Doing so makes
selecting consequences easy – when the behaviors are all
acceptable, the consequences are all positive! I truly believe (and
my experience working with children bears this out) behind every
negative behavior is a poorly arranged antecedent.

Some of you may have other insights to add to
my analysis or other solutions to suggest. There is certainly more
than one way to productively analyze a behavior and more than one
useful solution to be devised. The right analysis and solution is
the one that produces the desired outcome, fits the style in which
you and your bird are comfortable interacting and improves your
relationship with your bird. With Veda, all three criteria were
met. In out reaching, we are limited only by our powers of
observation, our creativity and our resolve to treat our parrots
humanely and with compassion.

Of course, behavior is not always as linear
as it appears when analyzing the ABC’s; but I think the more
important insight is that none of us, including our remarkable
parrots, behaves in isolation from the events around us. Although
analyzing behavior can sometimes be like walking into the hall of
mirrors at an amusement park, other times behavior is very
straightforward. It is a those times that a simplified approach to
analyzing behavior is just what we need to increase our
understanding and develop better teaching strategies. I have found
analyzing the ABC’s of parrot behavior to be very useful for
clarifying the related components of many, many different types of
behavior. Once these relationships are clear, the path to creative,
positive solutions and teaching plans become more clear as well. I
hope you will try analyzing the ABC’s and find doing so a helpful
addition to your parrot mentor’s toolbox.” [End of quotes]

Now, that’s just one example for one specific
behavior but by learning and practicing the ABC’s it can be applied
to any behavior. This became second nature for me for a very long
time but I have to admit, I sort of got away from it recently – I
mean, I still used the basic principal but I had stopped using the
ABC’s in my head. Rereading the above has reinforced my own thought
patterns when dealing with Pickles and I’m excited about getting
back to it.

You can join the PBAS group and learn more
about all of the above (and more) by just signing up and watching
the threads as they deal with specific people and issues, or you
can sign up for help with your own bird, or you can even sign up
for Susan Friedman’s LLP classes.

www.behaviorworks.org/

So, we joined the PBAS group to get help with
Pickles climbing down as it was getting ridiculous and at the time,
we were afraid of him getting hurt in the flyshop. I remember one
time when I was at the shop, working on the computer and a guy had
walked in the back door. I didn’t know he was there until he said,
“Well, hello there.” I said hello back as I finished up my work.
“Who are you?” he asked. I told him who I was and he said, “What
are you doing???” “Just finishing something on the computer” I said
then finally looked up to see him staring at the floor. I stood up,
looked over the counter and there was Pickles, climbing up the
guy’s pant leg. He’s looking a little freaked and Pickles was kinda
stuck, halfway up, saying “Step up bugger”, in an attempt to get
this guy to help him out.

I walked over, picked up Pickles, set him
back on his stand and went back out on the floor to talk to my
customer. A couple of minutes later, in the middle of conversation,
I noticed the guy looking down at the floor again and there was
Pickles, trying to walk away with his shoe lace. When I tried to
pick him up, he refused. Instead, he walked around backwards going
“Oh, oh, oh, oh” then dropped a nice load on the floor. I tried
getting Pickles to step up again but he kept walking backwards in
circles, away from my hand until he managed to walk right through
his poop pile. I finally got him up but now the poop was mashed
into the carpet and all over my hand. I glanced back at the guy as
I took Pickles back and the poor guy was looking as green as
Pickles poop. I’m glad I don’t own a restaurant, I thought as I
placed Pickles on his stand and grabbed a Kleenex to clean up my
hand and the floor. The next time Pickles climbed down, a couple of
minutes later, I intercepted him and he went straight into his
travel cage where he spent the rest of his time hollering “WANT
OUT!” and carrying on with his annoying squawk, which made for a
very uncomfortable conversation between the customer and
myself.

I don’t know how many times he managed to
sneak down when I wasn’t looking and he seemed to have a sixth
sense for the times he knew he could get away with it. Sometimes
he’d get lost in the shop and I’d have to hunt him down until I’d
find him on a clothes rack that he managed to climb, or chewing on
some product that he could reach from the floor. And, of course, no
way could he sit on a clothes rack without pooping on the clothing.
We had a strict policy in the store, ‘You poop on it, you bought
it’.

Then there was the time he climbed up the
drawers of my desk and managed to snap off most of the computer
keys, chew up some invoices and knock my coffee onto everything
else. It was quite the fight trying to remove him from the desk
because it was just too much darn fun for a little birdie. He saw
me coming and there was just so many things he needed to grab at,
knowing he didn’t have long on the desk. He was half flying, half
running, grabbing and throwing everything in sight and scattering
all my paperwork with his flapping wings as I tried to stop him.
“Ohhh crap” he said as I finally nabbed him, and got a hard bite
for my efforts.

We were trying everything we could think of
to get him to stay put but it was too easy for him to get down from
his stand to his cage and onto the floor. After a few days of this,
we tried keeping him in his cage but he was miserable. We started
leaving him at home, in his cage, but we hated doing this and
wanted him at work with us. It was heartbreaking to leave the house
with him whining, “Wanna go to work? Wanna make some money?”

After awhile, Pickles would refuse to go in
his cage when we left – which I talked a bit about in my last book
– and every morning, it was a struggle. His favorite trick was to
fall upside down on our hand when we tried to place him on a cage
perch. You can’t get a bird to step down when he’s hanging on to
your finger with his feet. We tried to kind of roll him on but he’d
just go limp and lay on his chest on the perch, still clinging to a
finger. Laying him on his back on the bottom of the cage didn’t
work, he could out last you every time. And prying his feet off
just earned you a good nip. We hated forcing him but we had no
choice.

We always got him up with us in the morning
and it was a couple of hours before we’d leave for work so we
didn’t feel it was fair to leave him in the cage all morning before
we left. We couldn’t get him back in the cage but we couldn’t leave
him out either. Bribing him into his cage with his favorite foods
worked but he caught on after a couple of days and stopped falling
for that. Every day, one of us had to stay home until Pickles could
be caged. We were at a loss and it was time to get help.

When we turned to PBAS, they helped us with
keeping Pickles aloft but we also worked with a couple of other
problems – mostly because he was developing them as a result of
training him to stay put. Pickles started screaming for attention
and refusing to step up on our hands as well as his refusal to step
down onto a perch.

It was at this point in the book that I had
intended to elaborate, as promised from the last book, more on how
we solved this problem. But, after looking over all my notes and
exchanges with the people instructing me, I realized that would
take pages and pages and pages so instead, I’m going to give a
quick run down and hope that if any of you are having the same
problems, you will join the PBAS group for help. After all, I
didn’t intend this book to be a book on advice; it’s just a story
about Pickles and his daily life.

After learning the ABC’s and discussing some
options we began some courses of action. First and foremost, we
built playstands for Pickles and provided him with lots of toys and
foraging opportunities to enrich his environment. Playstands were
situated around the house to allow him a change of scenery. We
learned to watch for signs of boredom and preempted his screaming
or climbing down by taking him to another room or window to give
him something different to look at. And all day long, no matter how
busy we were, we took the time to walk up to Pickles when he was
behaving well and chat for a few moments or hand him a toy or
snack.

Without enrichment, he was not going to be
happy just staying put. But even with all of that, there were still
times he preferred being with us. Of course he did. He likes
playing or chatting with us; parrots are social and enjoy company
the same as people. It wasn’t always convenient for us though.
Sometimes we were busy and couldn’t always give him what he wanted.
That’s when we started using time-outs. We use this to show him
that there were consequences for climbing to the floor and that he
wasn’t going to be able to access reinforcement. This meant making
sure we were aware and on top of it at all times because if he
reached the floor and had time to find anything interesting, it
just taught him to be more persistent. At first we just picked him
up immediately and plunked him back on his cage or playstand but
this just taught him that he not only found a way to access our
attention but there was no consequence to keep him from turning
around and getting right back down on the floor. If we were paying
attention, tapping on the top of the cage or giving him something
to eat or play with sometimes distracted him but only for a while.
But once again, his climbing down succeeded in gaining attention
from us.