Your Energy Impacts Your Parrot's Behavior
When sharing your life with companion parrot, you slowly slip into insanity where you just spark up gibberish conversations with them. I don’t make the rules, but my birds are the best ones to gossip with, especially Alfie,, my moluccan cockatoo. He “reads the room” the best and will match my energy.
How does this correlate to behavior? It does! Because the energy YOU bring to the table, they will MATCH or REACT. Before I open that cage, I take a deep breath and set the tone. If I come in unconfident, a lot of birds will pick it up and usually increased aggression happens. If I’m tense, my birds will be too and likely to be more alert or possibly even aggressive.
When I interact with my animals, I want to be as calm as possible. I want things to remain fun and positive for them and for me. I don’t want to bring my frustrations into my birds areas. That stays outside the house.
I get frustrated with my birds 100%. I honestly don’t know of a single person whose animals didn’t upset them at one point or another. We can’t always control that they make us upset, but we can control OUR emotions, which means staying calm and not over reacting because tension is building. If you can’t, just walk outside the house till you’re clear headed again. I’ve done it, I’m not afraid to say it. I’ve put birds back and sat outside for a hour or two. I did it so my birds weren’t affected. I worked on calming myself down and came back with a better attitude.
But it’s always important to digest the behavior that made us frustrated and formulate a plan or contact a trainer to be able to train or change so it doesn’t happen to us again. It will become a vicious cycle that will continue to create frustrated associations towards each other and then you have a much more serious problem.