Harness Training and Body Touching?

fiddlejen · Sep 12, 2019

My Sunny's Aviator Harness arrived the other day. (I should've gotten it sooner. She's finally starting to get a few flight-length wing-feathers.)

I've started watching the video. It says your bird must be used to body-handling, wing-touching, and then even wing-holding by you, BEFORE you ever try getting the harness onto her.

But, I have been Strictly Avoiding any such touching of my bird, as potentially hormonal-inducing!

Does anyone have advice as to how to accustom my Sunny to wing-handling and body-touching, withOUT awakening those pesky hormones?

(If it makes a difference, she is one-year-old this month, and she has been My Sunny for six months.)

chris-md · Sep 12, 2019

There is a difference between petting and stroking your bird, and clinically manipulating your bird. Your bird can tell the difference without any challenge.

fiddlejen · Sep 12, 2019

chris-md said:
There is a difference between petting and stroking your bird, and clinically manipulating your bird. Your bird can tell the difference without any challenge.

Okay. So any pointers? It took me quite a while after bringing her home to figure out how to do "scritches" correctly. And she clearly relaxed for the vet when we went in last week to pull a bleeding-new flight feather (which she broke doing a jump-down). But I have no idea what they did, which was okay, versus all the other touching, of which I haven't done any.

Do you mean it's okay to touch her anywhere as long as I don't move my fingers around?

chris-md · Sep 12, 2019

Don’t think of it as touching. That’s all. Work simply on being able to let sunny open the wings and move them around without a problem.

Gemster · Sep 12, 2019

Rubbing or stroking anywhere else than the head and neck is counted as sexual to birds although you should be able to touch and examine your bird everywhere.
Every bird is different so I can’t promise that touching won’t waken the hormonal side as Gemma gets quite hormonal when I blow on her. Sometimes weird things wake hormones. I haven’t yet seen that touching or to examine a bird make them hormonal though.
Touching the back and wings as for the harness training is fine as long as you don’t rub or stroke the body.

charmedbyekkie · Sep 13, 2019

Cairo is a touch-phobic bird. And we got him harness-trained before he was used to body-handling, wing-touching, and wing-holding.

We kept the touch part entirely in the context of training. He was on his training perch, we taught it at the same time as other tricks, and it was taught in the same manner as other tricks. Cue word and trick, then treat.

Here's a video, albiet a clunky one, that I made of how we did it:
[ame="https://youtu.be/arYFRBjdDeQ"]Aviator Harness Training - How We Did It - YouTube[/ame]

Am crashing from jetlag, but will try to follow up tomorrow.

Harness Training and Body Touching?

fiddlejen

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