First, I want to say thank you so much for your wonderful blog. I recently became the owner of a 3 year old red-rumped parrot because my older sister was unable to handle his hormonal and aggressive behavior. I've had a lot of success with target training and recall by following your guides, but he's still very cage aggressive. Main problem is when I put his food dish in, he'll attack my fingers as I slide down the feeding door. Is there another way for me to feed him or redirect the aggression?
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
If he’s only aggressive with the food dish that should be the main fix to the problem, if he’s generally aggressive when you reward any sort of food there may be more that has to be done or a lot of that may be easily rooted out through building trust and slow approximations between your hands and the treats or holding treats in a way where the bird can’t bite then over time they kind of learn there’s no need to aggress which is also explained in “aggression+ask” (above), fourth post (might be fifth after this one is posted), last paragraph.
