Liz Wilson
Parrot Behavior Consultant
In the course of my behavior consultations, I have encountered many different manifestations of aggression in pet parrots. This article discusses what I find to be the most common - biting - and how to use the foundation of what Blanchard calls Nurturing Dominance or Nurturing Guidance to control it. Fortunately, I find this to be one of the easiest parrot behavior problems to correct - IF the owner is patient and consistent.Biting Isn't "Natural"
It is important to understand that parrots in the wild rarely appear to use their beaks as a weapon against other parrots. If needed, the beak is a protection against predators such as snakes and raptors (birds of prey), but not against others in their own flock. In their natural environments, competition and/ or conflict between parrots rarely escalates to physical violence instead, they vocalize (scream) and/or use body language by strutting, posturing, and fluffing feathers to make themselves look bigger. Beaks are used for climbing, eating, playing (wrestling) and preening... not for biting.
This means that biting is not instinctive behavior. In actuality, biting is considered to be a "displacement behavior." Natural behaviors designed for survival in the rain forest are generally not possible in a human's living room so other behaviors take their place these are displacement behaviors. These "improvised" responses are not all negative, either a positive example would be a parrot's ability to bond to a human in the absence of members of its own species, and to accept the humans with whom it lives as members of its flock.
Why Is The Bird Biting?
The first question to ask when dealing with a biting parrot is why, under what circumstance is this happening? From my experience, birds bite for generally one of two reasons: survival or control. The category of "survival" would include a bird biting when it is terrified (i.e. when your smoke detector goes off and your parrot runs up your face) or when it is hurt. Contrary to that nice old saying, most animals CANNOT sense when you're trying to help them (i.e. "I was only trying to pull a broken blood feather, but he bit the @&%$# out of me!").
A slight variation on this theme would be hormonal behavior, which I will discuss in more detail in another article. Suffice it to say, an increase in aggression is common with many life forms when hormone levels are raging after all, look at many teenagers! (The parallel I like to use is myself and my bouts with PMS). Learning the bird's body language will go a long way towards preventing hurt feelings and fingers during this time and the advice is simple: when they are in full sexual display, DON'T REACH FOR THEM. Leave them alone until they settle down.
CONTROL PROBLEMS, or How To Turn A Nice Parrot Into A Biter
Since biting in parrots is a displacement, not an instinctive behavior, it is logical to assume that the behavior must be reinforced in some way or it would not continue. In other words, if it did not accomplish something positive in the parrot's experience, then the parrot would not continue to do it. This is important to understand: parrots in captivity are actually rewarded for biting by humans that simply do not understand how differently parrots can perceive things. The following are a few classic examples.
"The Teething Stage"
Young bappies (baby parrots) often have no idea what their beaks can do, especially if they were raised isolated from other bappies. During "The Teething Stage", the bappy is learning to eat and explore with it's beak, and a tragic scenario is often acted out. The bappy, in the process of exploring with it's beak, encounters those wondrous things called human fingers. If the human makes the mistake of using their fingers as toys in the baby's mouth, sooner or later the baby will bite down harder than the finger's owner might like. If the human responds to this accidental nip by yelling (as in, "OUCH, NO BITE!!!"), then they have inadvertently taken the first step towards actually teaching their bappy to bite.
Contrary to human beliefs, parrots really enjoy it when humans yell at them. Parrots often scream simply for the fun of it so it is a fallacy to think they perceive that yelling is a reprimand. On the contrary, they generally interpret yelling as positive feedback. This is what we call The Drama Reward. So the baby parrot will nip again, because the human inadvertently rewarded it for nipping. Sooner or later, the experimental nips will actually hurt the human (emotionally as well as physically), and the human's response becomes something to the effect of "YOU BAD BABY, YOUR MOMMY (or DADDY) LOVES YOU, HOW COULD YOU BITE YOUR MOMMY (or DADDY)??!??!!
The bappy doesn't understand what's happening here, of course it thinks this is a wonderful new game. You know, grab a finger and your person makes lots of WONDERFUL noise!!
| Top | Next |
 NetPets® Main Page |  The Bird Center |