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Training Your African Grey

25 16:33:19

When it comes to training your African Grey Parrot you must have a great amount of patience, tolerance as well as discipline. The African Grey is among the elite, the king of kings of the parrot kingdom.

 

There is a lot of information when training your African Grey. One vital piece of information is that you need to be firm and consistent, he needs to know that "NO" means "NO", not maybe or if you carry on you get way. Never shout, hit or abuse your African Grey in any way as this will produce a different result to what you want.

Like children they will test you and throw tantrums now and then. When this happens just ignore them, go do something else to keep yourself busy and calm yourself down for about 15 minutes, then go back to the training session. Things should have calmed down by then for both you and your African Grey.

The training session should not be long 15 - 20 is more than enough time. Remember their attention span is limited and your African Grey will become tired and lose concentration.
In some cases tape recorders are used to repeat words over and over again. This is not a bad idea if it is not used for extended periods. This will cause the bird to become bored and uninterested. A better way to teach your bird speech is simply to repeat words throughout the day. I like this approach more as it adds a personal touch as you are in a conversation with your African Grey.

Remember your parrot craves attention, they love learning and speaking and want to be your companion. You will thus achieve a lot more this way than using a tape recorder.Never forget that your African Grey still has his wild tendencies, care must be taken around children and people who are not familiar to him. All the members of your family must get involved with bonding to your African Grey, otherwise he will only bond with you and this will create a lot of problems later on.

They can help by cleaning the cage, making sure he has food and water and just making contact with your Grey.
If you neglect their emotional needs and only focus on their basic needs such as food and water they will become noisy and irritating. This will cause may problems if this problem is not dealt with swiftly.

Always work with your African Grey and reward their good behaviour. A one on one training period builds trust and companionship between you and your parrot. When starting to train your African Grey take small steps, encourage them with treats and praise.
Like earlier discussed, repetition is the best way to reinforce their learning process as well. Just as a child learns through repetition, your bird learns through repetition. It is important to choose a quite place for training where he will not be disturbed.

You want his attention on you and not on any other noises or movement that will distract him. It has been proven that the African Grey does not only learn words but also their meaning. This is why the idea of using a tape recorder to learn words is not very effective. Learning hello from a tape recorder has no meaning, however learning the word hello every time you greet him; he learns that hello is a greeting.

Training takes time and is not something that happens overnight, persistence and perseverance will be the key to success.
The time you spend with your African Grey should be exciting and rewarding at the same time. The training session should always be interesting, be creative and come up with your own ideas.

Just like many other training programmes there a lot of different training techniques from beginner to intermediate and finally advanced. The main thing to remember when training your African Grey is to enjoy it, make it playful, take baby steps and keep the training session short. For more information you can visit my blog site All About African Grey The Training.