potty training

[foobar]

weve had a grey for about 3 1/2 years now. he was hand reared and knows no fear. Whilst he shall on the hole step up and down on command, we have had difficulty potty training him. Whenever he goes now he says good boy but not always in the right place! can anyone recommend a good mehtod of abruptly doing this?

[BirdLadySecrets]

Well, there isn't an "Abrupt" way to potty train a parrot, whether African Grey or other species. It takes a whole lot of patience and even then, it isn't always perfect at best.

The way to perform the training is, identify the times that a parrot "goes" which are:
a) immediately after waking up in the morning or after a nap
b) about 5-10 minutes after eating
c) whenever they assume that stance that you probably recognize by now as meaning "I'm about to go potty".

Here's the trick that I've shared with the members of the Elite Parrots Club: prepare to give the command and place the parrot in the location you want to teach him or her to go potty just BEFORE you expect the need to occur. Then, when it happens correctly, give tons of praise and a treat. Later, as you get the training down better, the praise will be enough and you can easily reach a point over time where you can get him to understand that he has to go potty before you'll pick him up. There's a cute video at EPC of a member's bird arguing about going potty before she will pick him up!

Not to make this terribly long, after all it is my very first post here, but I'd like to share how my sun conure, SunDance potty trained herself and trained me. When she would go on my shirt, I'd take her back to her "house" (cage) and place her on her porch while I went to either clean the spot or change the shirt. Well, sometimes I'd get busy for forget to go back and get her and she didn't like this much. So, soon she began saying "go home". This meant she wanted to be returned to her house. If she were taken there, placed on her porch, which was her fav potty spot, she'd go immediate and want to be picked right back up. If her humans didn't respond at the first "go home", she's repeat the phrase and nibble on our necks to be sure we were paying attention. After she told us the third time, if we didn't respond as she had trained us, well, it was OUR fault we got dirty!

Good luck with your potty training!

[Talon]

That is very good advice and sounds easy to do. Talon has a potty basket that she uses. She also will whistle when she needs to go. ( most of the time) But if your not paying attention, it's your own fault.

Thanks for identifying the "times" when they tend to go.

[judygram]

Josey has a potty trash can she uses, but most of the dumps on me are from the sun conure.

[CeasarsDad]

Hi BirdLady.

So glad to see you in our forum here. Excellent on the potty training subject.. Thanks again and welcome..

[judygram]

Must have a few spare moments there huh, Frank.{Feel-good-00020069}

[Talon]

Ya, what's up with that? YOur supposed to be so busy keeping us up on all that we're missing. What are you doing wasting time here. Get back to those nice pictures! We want to see Hawaii!!! :woohoo: :woohoo:

[judygram]

He claims he can't sleep so he might as well get on the site. But I want to see the pictures too.

[Talon]

I think he's trying to keep the suspense going....what do you think? He knows we can hardly wait!! :cheer:
I guess the time zone took it's toll tonight.

{Feel-bad-00020066}

[judygram]

Lack of sleep will eventually catch up with you and by the time he adjusts to the time zone it will be time to come home.{Communicate-000200D7}