#aggression ask

much love to the husbirbs!

It varies on the scenario, species, and resources available

The biggest priority when dealing with a bite is safety - don't just leave your hand there waiting for them to calm down (worlds worst tidbit of outdated information), be proactive in getting yourself to safety. For most birds you can curl your hand in to a fist and present the back of your hand to use like a shield as there's no loose skin to grab on to and swiftly remove yourself from the situation. If they're on you grabbing your neck/ arm/ wherever depending on the intensity of the bite you may be able to just peel them off with a perch or use a high value treat lure/ well known behaviour to redirect them off of you. With birds that latch on and don't let go you want to move your hand in towards them to cause them to release their grip so you can get out, if they're on you biting what they're standing on you can use an object to tap the top of their head which typically triggers them to release and latch on to the other object while you pry them off.

A key thing to keep in mind is that once a bite has happened the damage is already done, there's no point trying to make a big deal out of the moment or apply more fear/ punishers to the situation. If we make a big deal out of a bite and tell them 'no gentle!, bad bird!" etc. you're drawing a lot of attention to the bite which can either cause them to be focused on it and be more likely to repeat it, cause them to feel more threatened, or your addition of noises/ arm movements can be interpreted as entertaining which can cause the bird to begin to fake aggression just to get a reaction. If we apply punishers, yell, or otherwise add more stress after the bite we're just confirming to them that we were in fact scary and that the bite was warranted, causing them to be more hesitant towards us in the future and potentially be more likely to use biting as a primary form of communication.

The bite having happened has occurred because something was triggering enough to cause it, they experienced whatever they were feeling and felt that a bite was necessary to alleviate it. A behaviour we don't want was practiced, the feelings they experienced have been associated with us, from this point on we want to make sure we can undo what they've just learned.

Each bird, each trigger, and each emotion behind a bite will all warrant different approaches following it.

If the bite occurred and you're feeling really distraught and emotionally unregulated it's best to prioritize that - if you need to cage them or just shut them in a room for a couple minutes so you can catch your breath and regain control then absolutely do that. There's nothing you can add to this situation by being impulsive or struggling yourself.

If the bird is lunging, hissing or clearly distressed by your attempts to remedy the situation then take a step back and give them a break. Continuing to trigger them will only make them ingrain those emotions with you even more, they need to be under threshold to be able to make new, happier, connections.

Next goal after getting yourself safe is to have a couple moments of neutrality. Ideally getting them on to a perch and just standing a couple steps away, no eye contact, body angled away from them, head tipped down, hands out of sight, remaining pretty still and quiet. This is a moment for both parties to breathe after the event, regulate emotions, realize they're safe, and reset. If they keep trying to get at you aggressively it may be best to leave entirely, if they're trying to get at you because they're more comfortable on you than the perch you can try a different spot, try standing closer, try being lower than their perch, try moving their perch up higher if you're not comfortable with them on you at that time. I like to use my knees for these situations, just sit down with my knees up so the bird can sit on me but be somewhere I can easily control if they aggress again. You can also utilize thick coats and gloves to help you mentally feel a bit better.

After that moment to breathe and reset you progress depending on the bird and the trigger. In some cases offering tasty treats can help them form new associations with you - in others the aggression was triggered by excitement so adding more exciting food to the situation can trigger it again. For some talking to them calmly can be a safe way to reengage with them, announce peace between the two and be able to progress - for others any vocalization may be interpreted as you being more confrontational. For some just sitting quietly near one another can reset the situation and cause them to realize it wasn't threatening - for others the continuous silence can cause them to stew in their feelings and retaliate. For some just remove the trigger from the situation and they'll regulate again, you can work on desensitizing that trigger another day - for some there isn't an easy clear cut trigger so you now get to evaluate what just happened and try to isolate it while monitoring your own body language extremely closely.

first would be a vet check, severe aggression can arise if an animal is in pain, I'd want to rule that out first before all else.

Aggression is a symptom of something else, usually it's fear-based even if you aren't seeing typical fear body language. Lots of birds have their boundaries pushed for so long that they just stop presenting the warning cues since they never work to make people stop and that's where you'll get cases where the bird will just jump straight to aggression to get their desired result. You may also be seeing aggression because they're stressed out, territorial, hormonal, or a variety of other reasons.

While we can't always know why the behaviour is occurring we can work with what we see in the moment. You approach the cage, they present aggressive behaviour to make you leave.

The Antecedent is you approaching, the Behaviour is lunging, the Consequence is you back away.

You can arrange yourself to work under the bird's threshold and reshape the sequence. Find the distance away you can be that doesn't trigger aggression and reinforce that calmness with whatever they find reinforcing. This can mean approaching the cage, clicking for calm, and then walking away if you leaving is what they want.

Now the Antecedent is you approaching, the Behaviour is soft body language, and the Consequence is you leave. They still earn the goal they wanted without needing to aggress to do so, calm body language should become more frequent.

Could be a few reasons!

Tricks are learned in one location and as a result they sometimes have to be partially re-taught in different places.  When they learn something they remember how to do it in one set of circumstances so when you’re asking for them to turn around somewhere new they may not fully understand what to do with these new circumstances.  Taking a little bit of time to reintroduce the concept should get them to have the ‘ah-hah!’ moment and they’ll remember exactly what to do learning it at a much faster rate than the first time you trained it (typically within one or two sessions but all birds will be different).  Over time the more different circumstances you have them in when you cue them the easier they’ll be able to generalize the concept to almost any condition.

Being that they may not know what you’re asking for on the table they may find you hand cueing them to be threatening.  Depending on how you give the cue it can stimulate different responses, being up high may be seen as a threat, a hand coming to grab them, and wiggling a finger will often produce an aggressive response.  On the perch they’ve learned that the hand means turn around but on a table they may still view it as something to be worried about.  Very slowly teaching them the concept on the table would help resolve that issue.  Ensure that if you do try this that you aren’t intentionally causing the aggressive response, keep your hand at a moderate height, move slowly, make the cue very clear and take it slow.  If they do aggress remove your hands and treats from the situation, pop them behind your back for example, look away for a moment until the bird has calmed down.  Doing that tells them that aggressing makes all the enjoyable things go away and they aren’t getting any captivating reactions out of you which helps extinguish the behaviour.

The other thing could just be a matter of location, if the table is really low and your whole person is hovering over them they may just be afraid to be in that position.  If it’s near a lot of their toys or food dishes there may be some possessive or territorial aggression happening here. Hormones may also be a factor, if they’re on somewhere flat and cozy they may perceive it as a place to nest or something else about that location is hormonally stimulating for them. The last thing I can think of right now is that it may just be entirely coincidental, perhaps every time you ask for it on the table you’re at the end of the session and they’re just exhausted and don’t want to train anymore.  Maybe they’re just really hungry and don’t want to be bothered at that time, getting ready to sleep, or some other factor that would affect their behaviour internally.

Parrotlets seem to have this quirk where they aggress towards sounds of crinkling things and I haven’t a clue why, it does happen with other species sometimes but it doesn’t seem to be as prevalent as with parrotlets.  My theory is that it may sound like an aggressive bird to them but there’s been no studies or anything to suggest that, maybe they just find the noise really irritating.  It could also perhaps replicate a predator but then that doesn’t make sense for why they tend to lunge for it instead of running away.  Crinkling foil has lead to seizures in cats so it’s possible there may be some weird correlation there but again I haven’t found any studies on the subject regarding birds and since it seems to be pretty specific to parrotlets I’m not really sure if it is related or not.

The best way to go about food aggression is to reinforce an incompatible behaviour, the most common method is to just have the bird not be near you when the food is going in, using station training you can teach a bird to stay on a designated perch for set or random periods of time.  When cued the bird can go sit somewhere specific  and await it’s treat for staying still, once you leave they can go in and enjoy their food.  During stationing most aggressive behaviour gradually phases out since they’re much more focused on staying on the perch for when you’re going to give them the special treat. Stationing is incompatible with aggressing since the only way to complete the behaviour and earn the reward is to stay still and stay calm. It’s takes some time and patience but is a relatively simple process to work with these situations. The following links explain a bit more and go over the process!

http://flock-talk.tumblr.com/tagged/territorial+aggression

http://flock-talk.tumblr.com/tagged/possessive+aggression

http://flock-talk.tumblr.com/tagged/aggression+ask

http://flock-talk.tumblr.com/tagged/differential+reinforcement  (new behaviour is stationing, old/ undesired/ incompatible behaviour is being aggressive)

http://flock-talk.tumblr.com/tagged/stationing+ask

That’s really strange, I’d make sure you’re not inadvertently stimulating the aggression, fast movements, odd noises and things like that can sometimes be cause for aggression.  What may also be happening is aggression due to overstimulation/ overexcitement, some sort of attachment-related issue where the food takes your attention away from them, perhaps the colour, size or something else that I’m just not certain of.

I would start with non-perishable food you can have out for a while, put it in a bowl you usually eat in and just bring it in but don’t pay much attention to it, keep it on the other side of the room and let the bird go about it’s business.  Maybe do some training, play with toys, give them treats for being calm while the bowl is in the room.  If they’re okay with it there gradually move it closer and repeat the process, plenty of treats for being calm and ignoring the bowl, if they’re being aggressive move the food back where it was before and distract them again. Keep at that until they can be around the bowl without showing any sort of reaction to it.  From there you can try slowly interacting with the food far away from them, give them treats for being calm and slowly interact with it more obviously so long as they’re relaxed, then gradually move closer to them repeating the same process as before. If they do happen to fly over try to station them back to another location and give them a reward for going there, then space out rewards so they learn to sit longer and longer in that area before a treat shows up.

Could be any number of things!

Moulting tends to make birds more irritable, it could have to do with the season throwing off their hormone balances which makes them more standoffish, you could be moving your hand a bit too quickly which makes them see it as a threat or it could have been an inadvertently reinforced behaviour (every time she bites she gets a head scratch so she’s learned, biting = head rubs).

If you’re referring to my burbs throwing a tantrum the other day that was because I had moved the entire cage to another part of the room (made the room have more space) which is what they were upset about, the cages themselves hadn’t been rearranged.  However, it is important to rearrange cage layouts frequently, you could leave their favourite perch if you wanted to but other perches and toys should be rotated! By keeping the area the same it can become very boring to them (increases risks of feather picking, not playing with toys, generally unhappy with the environment), increases the odds of them developing territorial behaviours towards the cage as well (the area is the same, it’s theirs, they’ve claimed everything as theirs, no one else can touch it) and keeping layouts the same can also make birds more susceptible to stress in different environments (more likely to get stressed when you take them to the vet, move, get a new cage, afraid of new toys and objects).  Moving the perches and toys around in the cage makes the area seem new and interesting, lessens the odds of them claiming it as their territory and getting defensive over it and gets them used to an ever-changing environment which lowers stress levels. Another factor is that they’re spending 12 hours on that one perch, that puts a lot of consistent pressure on the same parts of their feet all the time which can potentially cause sores or issues down the road.

Aggression is a major issue, especially with parrotlets since they claim so much territory all to themselves in the wild and are a naturally aggressive species, since I’d like to continue to have both my birds out of the cages all day together while I’m there rather than alternating (more out of cage time, better enrichment and exercise) I really need to keep on top everything that potentially causes aggression and rearranging the cages is a big factor in that otherwise they’d be non-stop trying to chase one another away from the cages and likely seriously injuring one another.  Typically when I rearrange the cage there’s no problem at all, they’ll just go to the next highest perch and nap but because I moved the entire location of the cage they got a bit upset last night.