#contrafreeloading

[flock-talk]

Hi Courtney! I have a 3 year old lovebird and I notice that he sleeps a lot during the day. I would like to encourage him to forage so I started hiding his food in foraging toys. However he has pellets in his night cage and he eats quite a bit during the night. It seems that he doesnt really want to forage during the day after eating at night. Would you recommend limiting his food intake at night? Are there ressources on feeding schedules you recommend?

Instead of limiting food intake (which can be dangerous for small birds with fast metabolisms) you could transition some of the overnight pellets in to very easy foragers. To start this could just mean having multiple different food bowls all over the cage with small amounts of pellets in each so they start to venture around looking for food.

From there I’d shift to a well known forager that’s been simplified so the food will be visible and low-effort to acquire and gradually transition the food to less and less of the bowls. That way they don’t have to have food intake limited but can gradually learn that their food is available in alternative locations. At some point the contrafreeloading principle will take over from there where the food that you work for is more reinforcing and desirable than the food that’s just freely available and you’ll get an increase in foraging activities.

Routine is still controversial, I’ve feed two separate scheduled meals. One meal in the morning that lasts all day and free feeding. Mia could easily have been free fed with no issues, newt over ate and needs the two separate meals to keep him from binge eating and having no food later in the day. At this point in time I’d say it’s an individual thing!

[blazed-chestnut]

Hear Your Horse Whisper - science based information and education

* WORKING FOR FOOD AS AN ENRICHMENT * This also relates to horses - it talks about the benefits of allowing animals to work for food - and t

Contrafreeloading

[birdchannel-blog]

Bird Term of the Day: Contrafreeloading

This is defined as a behavior in which animals offered the choice between eating food provided to them for free or working to get that food would eat the most food from the source that required effort. This term was created in 1963 by animal psychologist Glen Jensen.

Jensen ran a study on 200 male albino rats where the end result was the rats ate more from the food source where the rats had to press on a bar to get the pellet rather than the dish of pellets where they didn’t have to do anything at all. Jensen then studied the behaviors of gerbils, mice, birds, fish, monkeys and chimpanzees. In fact many have studied contrafreeloading since then with similar results, except for the domestic cat – which likes to be served. (But really, who's surprised by that?)

This 1963 study’s results were surprising because it would be more logical, from an evolutionary point of view, to not expand energy to get food when food is freely available.

Why do pet bird people care about this? Birds seem to want to work for food, which is a wild instinctual behavior. Avian behaviorists recommend that pet bird owners encourage contrafreeloading behavior with foraging setups and bird toys within the pet birds’ cages and that pet bird owners engage their parrots by training commands like step up or tricks such as the eagle, and then use a treat reward system. This keeps pet birds busy, active and healthy.