My Parakeet Panics

User Question
My parakeet is young. I want to hand train it. But every time I try to take it out of the cage, it has fear and it flies all around the cage. How can I take my parakeet out of the cage without it doing that? How can I make it trust me?

Lisa's Answer
I'll just warn you that you triggered one of my pet peeves here :) You can NEVER "make someone trust you" just like you can NEVER "make someone love you". The moment you start thinking of trying to force another living creature to bend to your will, you've missed the whole point of the relationship. Love and trust and emotional feelings are all about VOLUNTARY actions on the part of both people. They can NEVER be forced or made to happen.

OK, got that out of my system :) So what you really want to do here is to give your parakeet every opportunity so she decides ON HER OWN that you are worthy of trust. Parakeets are extremely intelligent and quite actively learn to trust some people and not trust other people, based on what those people are like in their lives. So you need to show this parakeet that you are worthy of her trust.

It sounds like you didn't read my hand training instructions. You should NOT be trying to take a parakeet out of its cage if it's not even used to your hand yet! A parakeet should never be brought out of a cage until it is fully finger trained. To do otherwise is quite dangerous, because how are you going to get it back IN its cage if it's afraid of you?

http://www.lisashea.com/petinfo/articles/bird_hand.html

Please read the training material again and go through this slowly, with patience. It sounds like this is a bin-o-budgies bird and is therefore quite wild. It is going to take you weeks to train it. So settle in for the long haul. Your first week or two is simply about the bird trusting your hand - not even touching her or perch-training her! Work on that. Only once she trusts your hand and does not panic when you put your hand in can you go on to the next step.

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