Welcome to the Animal Training Academy podcast show. I'm your host, Ryan Carledge, and I'm passionate about helping you master your animal training skills using the most positive and least intrusive approaches. Here at ATA, we understand that navigating the vast challenges you encounter in training requires a comprehensive base of knowledge and experience. It's common to face obstacles and rough patches on your journey that can leave you feeling overwhelmed and stressed.
Therefore, since 2015, we've been on a mission to empower animal training geeks worldwide. We've aided thousands in developing their skills, expanding their knowledge, boosting their confidence, and maximizing their positive impact on all the animal and human learners they work with. We are excited to do the same for you. Simply visit www.atamember.com, join our vibrant community, and geek out with us.
And of course, in the meantime, enjoy this free podcast episode as we explore new ways to help you supercharge your training skills, grow your knowledge, and build your confidence so that you can craft a life that positively impacts every learner you encounter. But we will start today's episode where I'll be talking to one Belinda Young. Belinda is a companion animal trainer in Queensland, Australia.
She developed a passion for animals from a young age and began her career in vet nursing in 2008. During this time, she completed her Diploma of Animal Technology at the Canberra Institute of Technology, where her interest in animal behavior and training began. In 2016, Belinda earned her Cert IV in Companion Animal Services through the Dauter Institute, a leader in dog trainer education in Australia.
In 2013, Belinda founded her business, Treat Play Love, after recognizing a need for reward-based pet training in her city. She has continued her work as she moved from Townsville to Sydney and now to Toowoomba, supporting her husband's career in the Australian Army. Belinda is committed to ongoing professional development through seminars, webinars, and courses, and is a member of APDT Australia and PPG Australia. Belinda is also an Animal Training Academy Happiness Engineer.
She is on the ATA team, sharing the task of community moderation within the ATA membership and managing our CEUs for our members. She helps our amazing members overcome training challenges and cheers them on with their successes. So without further ado, it's my very great pleasure to welcome Belinda to the show today, who is patiently waiting by in Toowoomba, Australia. Belinda, thank you so much for jumping on this podcast episode with me. Thank you so much for asking me.
And I'm excited about this one. We're going to do something a little bit different, everyone. We're going to be discussing a specific case study involving Belinda and the beautiful and wonderful Scramble, also known as Scram, a crimson-bellied conure who lives with Belinda. Now, for everyone listening to this podcast, which could potentially be quite a lot of people who don't know what on earth a crimson -bellied conure is, can you enlighten them, please, Belinda? Yeah, absolutely.
So crimson-bellied conures are a small South American parrot. They're native to the regions of Bolivia and Brazil and live in the forest in those regions. I suppose as far as commonly kept companion parrots, they're quite similar to green-cheeked conures in size and volume. There's always something people are interested in with conures. But yeah, they're a small, colourful parrot and can make very charismatic, funny little pets.
And to give people a reference point to their size, we're talking softball size? Oh, I've never compared them to a ball. Like a small rat size? Oh, they're probably a little bit smaller than a rat. So Scramble weighs between 80 and 85 grams, depending on how much time he's spent at the food bowl. They're smaller than a cockatiel, which people might be a bit more familiar with. That's a good reference. Thank you. You're better at this than me.
And obviously being so light because they are a bird and they've got many adaptations for flying. Hollow bones, honeycomb structured bones, feathers, ear sacs. Crimson-bellied conures have ear sacs, do they not? Yes, absolutely. All these adaptations to help them nice and light for flying. Now, just to share at this stage, before we talk a little bit more about what it's like to live with a conure, we're going to be talking specifically about feather destructive behaviour today.
Can you share a little bit with everyone listening when I say feather destructive behaviour, what that means? Absolutely. So feather destructive behaviour is a problem that is really exclusively seen in captive parrots. We tend not to see it in wild populations. And it is a behaviour challenge where the parrots are damaging their own feathers. Or they could be damaging the feathers of a companion as well, another parrot.
But most often we see that it is self-directed and it can include barbering, where they're chewing little bits off their feathers, or plucking, where they're removing the feather completely. And I guess related, but not always in the same case, you sometimes see self-mutilation as well, which is sort of a step beyond feather destructive behaviour, where instead of damaging the feathers, the bird is damaging their skin, which can be extremely distressing.
So for the majority of our listeners who have experience with dogs, it might be similar to sucking on a paw, kind of self -mutilation type behaviours, that goes rear or over licking so much so that they go raw. Yeah, it can be. And I think also maybe tail biting you see in some breeds of dogs and some individuals. Yeah. And for those of you listening who work with different species, I mean, self-mutilation is something seen across taxa, not just with dogs and parrots.
Now, hold this challenge in your minds, everyone. We're going to circle back to it. Just share a little bit more about Belinda's situation, because I think you the listener, you're probably not living with a conure yourself. You're probably not living. I know a segment of our listeners are living with and keeping parrots. And so I'm excited to be doing this episode with you.
But if you're listening and you're not used to living with a parrot, or you've never lived with a parrot or you've never even had any experience working with parrots, can you just give us a little bit of an insight to your world, Belinda? Because Scram is just one of the many colourful and delightful animals you share your home with. Who else is part of your menagerie? Yeah. So my husband, Steve, and I, we have got one dog because we're a very normal couple.
And one dog is a good number of dogs to have. But we have got 11 parrots. So fortunately, we both thoroughly enjoyed parrots when we met. So we both came to the relationship with that passion. And currently our 11 include four cockatiels, two princess parrots, a green-cheeked conure, Scramble, our crimson-bellied conure, two yellow-naped amazons, and a green-winged macaw. Hopefully that comes to 11.
And you're going to have to Google the rest of those species, everyone, to learn the colours they have and everything more about them. So they are the individuals that you live with and they're into Wumba. But what is it like living with parrots? I say that every time I talk to you, I can see things in your background on your Zoom that I don't normally see when I speak to a lot of people.
Right now, when I'm looking at your Zoom screen, I see a big piece of what people might describe as driftwood kind of sticking up in the corner. And depending on where you're sitting, you might have multiple big pieces of wooden furniture, tree -like structures around your house. And you've also got a giant aviary attached to your house. Can you share a little bit about the setup and what it takes to care for 11 parrots and one dog?
Shout out to Wilbur. Yeah, Wilbur's a little bit lower maintenance. He's quite happy as long as there's a couch and a sunny sandpit to alternate between during the day. For our birds, I like to think we go above and beyond. We're always looking at ways that we can continue to do it better, but we try to set up our house so that each of our birds has got the opportunity to move and socialise and engage in species-specific behaviour.
So when we relocated to Toowoomba at the start of 2024, we were looking to purchase a house, and that gave us an opportunity to look for a layout that would work really well for us. Not all of our birds get along, so keeping everyone safe means keeping some of them separate from one another. We have got three separate bird rooms as well as the conures live in the living area. So you could call that four bird rooms if you like.
And in all of the common areas, we've got different playstands and areas that the birds can spend time when they're out of their enclosures so that they've got different options for climbing, playing, resting, preening, eating, anything that they might like to do. And then, as you say, we've also got a very large aviary or enclosure that we've constructed in our backyard. We use the same material that sort of catios, netted cat enclosures, are made from.
We've been doing that since about 2011 in some form or another. But in our current house, we're very fortunate that we've been able to enclose a very large portion of our backyard extending off our patio. So that means that when we're at home and supervising and some bird or another out of their cage enjoying some social time, we can open up the back door and they can choose to come and go inside and outside. They've got access to the patio, which is undercover.
They can also go out into the main area where they've got ropes and perches and they can enjoy the sunshine or, on a day like today, the rain, which the Amazons and the macaw especially enjoy showering and bathing in the rain. So, yeah, we've got basically a house dedicated to our birds. So it's the bird's house. You guys just kind of live amongst them as opposed to the other way around. That's right.
And our neighbours up a surprising distance along the street have very quickly identified us as, oh, you're the bird people. Just the bird people or do they use other adjectives to describe you? They might not use them to our face. Are the birds allowed in every part of the house or do you have some parts that are human only? Theoretically, they're allowed in most of the parts of the house.
Our two male yellow-named Amazons have been feeling the warm, rainy season in recent months, which has led to them doing some cavity -seeking as they look for good places for eggs. I don't know which of them is supposed to lay the eggs, but they're certainly looking and that's led to us needing to shut off parts of the house so that they can't access those to try and minimise some of that reproductive behaviour. But in general, they're allowed in most places.
Sometimes the birds will accompany one or the other of us into the shower to enjoy some steam or they'll just ride around with us as we potter around and do housework. But they spend most of their time either in their enclosures, their cages, or in the main living area, which is where we spend most of our time as well, or in the enclosure in the backyard. I like my house except I've always got a mini human following me around or also a dog following me around, but with parrots.
So basically there's always kind of a bird hanging out at any time of the day regardless of what you're doing? Yeah, definitely, with some of them not getting along to ensure that they all have adequate time to exercise and be social. We've generally got a bit of a crate and rotate system going on where somebody is out all of the time. Crate and rotate. Okay. Now I can assume everyone listening, a little bit more about scram.
We've talked about what species scram is, talked about the fact we are going to be talking about feather destructive behaviour today. But what happened with scram? What led to us being on this podcast together today to talk specifically about him and this challenge that you've been facing for the last wee while? So scramble is the youngest parrot in our household. He will be five years old in March of 2025. So he's about four and three quarters now. He hatched unexpectedly in 2020.
At the time we had a breeding pair of crimson-bellied conures, his parents, that we had acquired from a friend when she was needing to move unexpectedly and had to relocate some of her birds. And for the couple of years prior, that pair of birds had bred and I had hand-reared the babies, two from each clutch, to rehome as pets. And that had been a great joy, something that I really enjoyed doing.
And it was a lot of fun to raise those babies with the knowledge of behaviour and training and development that I've acquired over the years. And they found some really lovely homes. One of the homes from the first year actually came back for a second bird the second year, which was lovely. In 2020, after some thought, I had found that I was feeling very anxious at the thought of trying to find excellent homes for any future babies.
It's obviously a big responsibility to bring new animals into the world and to raise them and then to home them in a way that I guess you're satisfied that they'll receive the standard of care that you would expect and hope for. And then in addition to that, the sort of anxiety I was already starting to experience, the world started to fall into chaos with the COVID-19 pandemic and the idea of trying to home baby birds during lockdowns just seemed crazy.
So when this pair of birds started to lay in 2020, I felt that it was the right decision to not allow those eggs to hatch. And the step that I took to prevent that from happening was to addle or shake the eggs. And I felt that I did that very thoroughly over a number of days throughout the week that those eggs were laid.
But nonetheless, about three weeks later when I was checking the aviary in the evening before bed, I heard a very quiet little cheeping sound and checked the nest box and there was Scramble. And you can see now where he got his name from. So when Scramble hatched, obviously in COVID lockdown, I hand raised him. It's not ideal to hand raise a single bird. It's nice for them to be in a group so that they can sort of learn social behaviours together. But fortunately, he was raised.
I had my two female green-cheeked conures at the time and they were very interested in him. And as he developed, he was able to interact with them. But raising a single baby bird during a lockdown when you're not doing all that much else, it's a recipe for becoming very attached. And I said to my husband, this one's staying. You know, we're not going to rehome Scramble. He's a member of the family. And so he has been. Scramble, his development was really normal.
He's always been a really active, playful, busy little bird. He has had some fairly sort of tumultuous relationships, I guess, with my female conures and with also my husband Steve. So at different times he's been unable to interact with them well, showing some aggressive behaviours, I think initially stemming just from high arousal during play, but then potentially a little bit later on stemming from, well, perhaps reproductive behaviours or perhaps a little bit of just habit.
But he was otherwise sort of well, happy, healthy, playful, busy, enjoyed flying, really good eating. In 2021, so just before the new year, we ended up moving for Steve's work, and we moved from Townsville to Sydney, which meant that the birds flew from Townsville to Brisbane, where they boarded with friends for a couple of weeks while we moved to Sydney and set up the house for them. And that all appeared to go well. Everyone arrived and settled in really nicely.
And then it was the end of 2022 where unfortunately we found out we were moving again. The rental that we were in was sold, and that's where the challenges started for Scramble. So with a local move, moving within Sydney, so one suburb to another, instead of it being a move where we could fly the birds to a boarding facility, pack up the house, set up the new house, and then bring the birds back in, we had the removalists in while all the pets were still in the house.
And this was understandably quite a stressful day. The birds coped okay, but with people moving through the house, everyone was a little bit sort of, they were quite active in their cages, they were quite vocal in their cages if unfamiliar people were nearby or if they were moving strange objects near like trolleys and boxes and big pieces of furniture. So we had that throughout a full day. We had removalists in the house packing up our belongings.
And then on that same day in the evening after all of the removalists had gone, Scramble appeared to take a small fright in his cage where he bumped around the cage a little bit, sort of knocking into the walls. And shortly after that I happened to notice that he had plucked all of the feathers from the top joint of his left wing. This was distressing to see.
It obviously happened in a really short amount of time and he hadn't just plucked a few feathers, he had plucked that part of the wing completely bare. But otherwise he seemed okay. He wasn't holding any part of his body as though he might have broken anything. He was still solicitous of attention. When we got him out of his cage, he quite quickly settled on a play stand and had some supper.
But obviously that sudden presentation of what appeared to be quite a significant problem, it was a worry. So the next day I took Scramble to see the vet where he had a full health check as well as some X-rays. We were able to rule out anything other than perhaps a little bit of soft tissue injury on the wing, which might have been causing some discomfort. So we went home with some medication to address any pain that he might have there and hoped that that would be the end of it. It wasn't.
And over the sort of next 12 months during the rest of our time in Sydney, Scramble continued to pluck not just that area of his left wing, but he started to pluck the matching area of his right wing. He started to pluck underneath his wings and then he started to pluck around his legs and his belly as well. So by the end of 2022, he had gone from having a bald wing to having a... He no longer had a crimson belly. He had a white, downy, fluffy belly. He'd removed all of his red feathers.
Well, before we go on, just share a lot of empathy for you and Steve and everything that all the emotions and all of the uncertainty and all of the surprise, I'm assuming, when you found for the first time that new areas were being plucked and the problem was worsening over time. I'm curious, like, would you, looking back now, how do you think about that Sydney move? Would you change how you did that now? Do you think it was the people coming in?
If you were to do it again, would you get all the animals out? Yeah, that's such a good question and one that I've thought about because it's, I guess, quite likely that we will move again in future with Steve's work.
I think what I would do now, and certainly what I do do now if we've had tradespeople in the house or anything similar to that, we tend to move the birds into parts of the house where the activity is going to be less and then relocate them again if the tradespeople need access to those areas.
And that has worked well so far and even, I mean, this year in our new location in Toowoomba, we've had various tradespeople doing various works and there have been times where Scramble has been housed separate from but in view of the works and he's been quite content and curious, I would describe, sort of settled in his cage and going about his usual activities, which has been really nice to see.
But obviously the intensity of those tradespeople has been a lot less than a whole house full of removalists, which is what he had to contend with in Sydney. Yeah, and would I be right in understanding that there's no clarity in whether that move in Sydney and having new people in the house moving around, doing lots of activity, was the catalyst versus seemingly a single event that caused some kind of fright?
And even then, there's never going to be black and white data to say it was one of these two events or it wasn't. How do you process that? Do you spend time thinking about that or have you just gone, it is what it is and now I'm going to spend my energy dealing with what's in front of me? So further disruptive behaviour is a really challenging or complex problem to deal with and it can be really hard to resolve because it can be, I guess there can be multiple factors that can contribute to it.
We are making our best guess based on the fact that the first presentation of Scramble's leather plucking behaviour started on the day that we had a couple of big significant things happen. We had the prolonged stressor of removalists in the house followed by an acute stressor of a physical injury. We don't know though. It is just an educated guess and we also don't necessarily know what's maintained the behaviour over time.
So further plucking behaviour can be due to, it can have medical causes. They're not feeling well. It can be pain in certain parts of the body. It can be skin irritation. It can be nutritional. It can be social. It can be reproductive and it can be due to chronic stress or behavioural and at different times it could be different things that's driving the behaviour. So as much as we try to address each of the potential causes, it can be quite a hard one to pin down completely.
What strikes me about everything you've just said is the complexity and challenge that someone like yourself, whom is a knowledgeable, educated, skilled professional, and you then, my mind wanders to a layman parrot owner who is faced with this challenge. It's a, I can't think of too much comparable challenges with this level of complexity.
I know there are, I'm sure there are, but it just seems like out of all of the challenges that I can think about, the infinite number, this one, it's just one that can be really challenging even to, again, knowledge, skilled, experienced professionals. And I know multiple people who fit that criteria, who find this really challenging. Like before we move on, do you have anything to add in terms of just for the listeners kind of wrapping their head around this specific challenge?
Yeah. I mean, even early on when the problem initially presented, I certainly felt a lot of pressure from myself, directed at myself, that I should be able to fix this. I should have all the information to be able to fix this. And certainly there was, I guess, a sense of frustration and sadness and I guess a little bit of embarrassment that it was ongoing.
But the most important thing that I was able to do was to reach out to people who, you know, knew more than me, or perhaps just had a fresh set of eyes to put on this case so that I could try and get a, I guess, a holistic picture of what might be going on and what else I could be doing to better support Scramble. And in reaching out and collaborating, it also gave me a, you know, a much better sense of, I guess, peace and wellbeing as I continued to work on this problem with Scramble.
So for, I guess, lay people or people who have not seen this type of behaviour challenge before, that would be my advice is reach out to other people. You shouldn't be embarrassed that this is happening. It happens for all sorts of reasons. And I guess, you know, whether you're talking to an avian vet or you're talking to a vet behaviourist or you're talking to a parrot trainer and behaviour consultant, there are so many different people who can help.
So, yeah, collaboration has been a really big thing for me over the last two years. You don't have to wear all the hats. You can surround yourself and you should surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. That's how I always think about it. Absolutely. Yes. Now I'm excited to talk about what you did next.
Everyone listening, Belinda, I and the fantastic Shelley Wood, our other ATA Happiness Engineer slash community moderator and also host of our podcast show, The Making Ripple Show, we talk sometimes nearly daily in a group chat we've set up. We discuss what's happening in the ATA community areas, but we also share extensively about our own animals. And I feel fortunate to have been involved in Scram's journey this way. Belinda has shared so much with me and Shelley over the last wee while.
Belinda also shares a lot bravely in our Animal Training Academy members-only community areas. But there's been a lot more that's been shared within our little Facebook messenger group. Now, having worked with parrots myself extensively over my career, I know how prevalent feather destructive behaviour can be and how incredibly challenging it can be to address.
And as you bravely shared with Shelley, me and the ATA members, as well in our community areas, I found myself truly inspired by so many aspects of what you did, Belinda, and how you approached the situation. So I'm thrilled now that we have this platform, this podcast show, to share your journey with our wider audience and create some ripples out there. I also love how much of what you did and how you approached things is applicable to all species, really, in many different situations.
Some of it's really specific for feather destructive behaviour, but I think a lot of the principles and things we're going to talk about are applicable to other species and other situations. So I'm excited not only to share about the feather plucking destructive aspect, but also everything you've done and learned as an already highly competent, knowledgeable and skilled trainer coming into this. So let's get started. Can you walk us through the beginning of your intervention?
Absolutely. So the way that Scrambles Feather Plucking started appeared very much to be in response to a physical injury. So like I said, our first step was to take him to an avian vet. And in a way, we were so lucky that that happened in Sydney because options were much more limited in Townsville, where we were living before. But in Sydney, we were spoiled choice with avian vet services. And certainly that was our starting point.
So we started to treat him for pain and inflammation in the hope that as that soft tissue injury resolved, so with the feather plucking, when that wasn't the case, we went back and we continued our medical workup. We found a very small yeast overgrowth in Scrambles' crop, and we were able to treat that too.
We also found some changes to his kidney values, and we investigated treatment options for that just in case there was any, I guess, sort of systemic or whole body discomfort that was going on. We started a different type of treatment for a different type of pain. Again, just attempting to rule out that as a possible contributor to the behaviour that we're seeing.
And we also looked at medications and supplements that would support nice, healthy skin just in case there was any irritation or itching that was going on. And I guess the thing is with each medical intervention that we took, there was a period of time that followed where we were watching to see what the outcome of that change in treatment would bring.
And there would be revisits to see if, for example, the little yeast overgrowth had cleared up in his crop and his kidney values had gone back to normal and so on and so forth. And so I would say that 2022 into 2023, so the first year of his feather plucking, was really a year of looking for medical rule-outs. And I was doing that. It made sense to me to do that.
It's really important if you've seen a sudden change in behaviour that you are looking to rule out any medical causes because you can't train those away. But I was also really hoping for myself that it would be medical and there would be a magic treatment that would just fix it because obviously that seemed like it would be an easier solution than making broad sweeping changes to our environment and this routine that we're keeping with Scramble. So that was through 2023.
Got to keep my years straight. And at the end of 2023, we were getting ready to move again. And obviously through that time, I'd seen that Scramble's feather plucking behaviour had continued and spread to more areas of his body. And there was no avoiding this upcoming move. There was no avoiding that it was going to be stressful. This was another move back to Queensland.
So it involved another flight where they'd go to Brisbane and they'd stay again with friends until we were settled in Toowoomba and we could bring them and settle them into our new home. And while they were staying in Brisbane, we took the opportunity to have a recheck with the avian vet there. And we decided at that time to trial a hormone implant for Scramble. That was an avenue that we hadn't tried yet.
And given Scramble's history of aggression towards my husband in particular, but also to by this point, I only had one female green chick conure, Savvy. Savvy at times. It felt like it was worth trying to see what impact hormone suppression might have for Scramble. So while he was boarding with our friends, he went to the vet, he had his bloods rechecked and he had a little hormone implant put in into his breast just under the skin.
When Scramble came home, which was just a day or two after he had that implant put in, the difference in his behaviour was quite remarkable where he had typically been quite highly aroused and showing some aggressive behaviour towards my husband. He was now affiliative and solicitous of attention, which was amazing to see. It opened up a lot of opportunities for Scramble to spend time out of his cage where he previously hadn't been able to. Yes, if my husband was in the room.
And he also started to show more sociable behaviours with my green chick conure, Savvy. So that opened up some lovely opportunities as well for him to have some positive social interactions, not with the same species, but with a very similar species. So I judged that that was a big benefit as well. So this was all looking up. We're very excited. And then he started to pick at the skin just above the implant with his beak.
And he made quite a large hole in his skin, which started our next unhappy adventure, not just into the world of feather plucking, but now into self-injurious behaviour. And again, take this opportunity to provide empathy for you. Thinking back to that time, what a horrible situation to find yourself in where an animal that you love and care for is causing damage to themselves in their way. So I know that I've said this many times over the years, but really sorry that you had to go through that.
It seems that in that situation, although not being able to say this with confidence, it seemed likely that this hormone implant, the benefits that came with it, was potentially the causation of this new behaviour. Yeah, that's certainly what it seemed like to us. It's difficult to describe how upsetting it was to see that very first shallow wound that Scramble had created in his chest.
And then additionally to think that it was a decision that I had made to try this implant that had seemed likely had triggered this response. I had had hormone implants for other small parrots in the past, usually for female parrots that were doing egg laying. And I had not had a problem with those birds, but for Scramble on this occasion, it seemed pretty likely that the implant was causing him some distress. Obviously, we're talking back to the vet.
We've seen the vet a lot throughout this journey. We opted to put Scram on pain relief to hopefully address any discomfort that might be making it more likely that he would continue the behaviour. But for a period of several weeks, we saw that the wound would start to heal up. And it seems that as the scab dried out and started to contract, it would become uncomfortable again and Scram would remove it and would be back to square one.
During this time, obviously the progression from feather plucking, which is distressing, and it's not something that we wanted to see, but it was not life threatening. This progression now where Scram had essentially an open wound on his body that he wasn't allowing to heal, this had the potential to be a life threatening condition and behaviour. And it was extremely distressing to watch.
As it would start to heal up, my mood would elevate and then he would damage it again and I would come crashing right back down again, feeling really unsure about how I could best support him to let this wound heal up. During this time, I started to look at every single piece of environmental change that I could make to try and better support Scramble to return to healthy and normal behaviour.
So in addition to the support we were getting from the vet and the medication to try and keep Scramble comfortable, during this time, like I said, one of the benefits of this implant, which had also caused us to be facing this problem, we think, Scramble was now being quite sociable with my female green -cheeked conure. And during this time they'd been spending a lot more time together out of their cage and I had started to house them together during the day when I was at home.
I was able to change their living arrangement so that they were housed together full time. And this also meant that we had a spare cage, so I was able to move that to a different part of the house where Scramble and his now roommate Savvy could be shifted to of an evening so that they had a longer period of uninterrupted rest each evening instead of having approximately eight hours that Stephen and myself were asleep and the house was quiet.
They now had anywhere from 10 to 12 hours, which can help with the reduction of some reproductive behaviours in birds but can also just mean that they're well-rested and in good mental health. I also started to remind Scramble of some of the basic training that we had been working on in his younger years.
So at the time that was just some sort of silly tricks like turnaround or recalls, targeting, some of the little basic skills that we commonly teach animals of all species but they're common ones with parrots. His diet has always been quite good. He is a great lover of fresh food, vegetables, fruits, which they don't get a lot of, and fresh browse from the garden. So we've got lots of native flowers and plants that are safe for our birds to eat.
So I was making sure that he was getting access to a lot of those. And I also started to use our training sessions to basically help Scramble to upskill, particularly in the area of foraging, which unlike a lot of our other birds who have shown some, I guess we could say natural aptitude for foraging toys, they will see something new and they will investigate it and they'll find a way to get the snacks out of various toys.
Scramble has always been a little different with, say, like a little clear acrylic cup foraging toy with a lightweight lid on top. Most of our birds will figure out quite quickly to flick the lid and get the snacks. Scramble will sit on the perch and lick the clear plastic and then beat up a nearby toy because how could we possibly solve such a challenging puzzle?
So instead of expecting that he should be able to solve these problems on his own, I started to teach him the component skills that he needed to be able to chew and lift and manipulate and use these toys in different ways. So happily he is now quite an adept forager, which has been a great benefit of this whole journey. So we had some new drugs on board to help with the possibility of any pain.
And, well, I mean, if you think about damage to skin and the way that that damage was done, then I think it's pretty safe to say that pain would have been involved. But if there was any pain contributing to the ongoing behaviour in that medication, we could hypothesise would have influenced potentially future behaviour. We added social enrichment with regards to other parrots and spending time together, longer rest periods, diet evaluation, using training to upskill, especially with foraging.
And if we think about the natural history of the species and what they probably spend a lot of energy on in the wild, I think that's, from that perspective, a really clever thing to do. And in saying that, I think that applies more broadly to the majority of not all the species that we look after, whether they're in our homes or in zoos or wherever you're looking after animals. So what was the result of all of these changes?
So throughout all of these changes, obviously I've seen Scramble, he was engaging well with Savvy. I felt that social box was being ticked in ways that it hadn't been before. His foraging behaviour was improving. He continued to show decreased aggression towards my husband, so that meant that he was enjoying more time out of his cage, which meant more exercise and more social time with people as well.
Unfortunately, he continued to do damage to his skin, despite my working with my avian vet team. And at that point, I think we're probably about maybe four to six weeks after he started to damage his skin, we made the decision to remove the implant, mindful that we might see some other behaviours reoccur, such as aggression towards my husband. But we felt that it was unlikely that Scramble would let his skin heal while there was still something under his skin which seemed to be bothering him.
At this same time, we made the decision to fit a very small Elizabethan collar. So for Scramble, we used a soft collar with the hope that that would be very lightweight and allow him to continue engaging in as much normal behaviour as possible. But while he still had this wound on his chest, and now he had a couple of small, well, one small suture stitch from where we removed the implant, we really wanted to maximise the chance that that would heal. So at this point, it's not ideal.
We really didn't want to use the collar because it is preventing him from continuing the behaviour, but it's not addressing why he is doing this behaviour. And with all the changes that I had made to his environment and lifestyle, I was feeling really unsure about what else I could do. And at this point, I reached out to a friend and colleague, Lee Stone, at Parrot Life Behaviour, and I asked if we could have a consult to just brainstorm what else could I be doing.
And with her encouragement, I started to look at how I could make some of the training that I was doing with Scramble more cognitively challenging. So increasing that mental enrichment for him, giving him some challenges and teaching him how to overcome them. But also at her suggestion, I reached out to a veterinary behaviourist who has experience with parrots and other exotic animals.
And in consulting with her, I was able to look at particularly ways that we could better support Scramble with the use of different medications. So that was with Dr Kat Gregory, who I'm working with on an ongoing basis to help support Scramble. So following this, we now had more medications to support Scramble's brain and to keep him physically comfortable.
And I was starting to look at some new training challenges for him as well on a daily basis to see if we could help him to regrow some feathers and hopefully not continue to damage his skin. How do you think about now going through what you've been through, hormone replacement implants?
And this question is about what I've just asked, but it's a bigger question as well in terms of, let's say, you've got whatever challenge you have with your animal, you implement it, and then it doesn't do what you hoped it would do. How do you frame that in your mind as a professional? Do you go, oh, I'm never going to do that again, or you've got to try things out to get the data about your individual animal?
If someone was to come up to you now, Belinda, and ask you what advice do you have about hormone replacement implants, how does that experience shape your perspective and the answer you might give someone about that? So I think one thing that I often feel frustrated by, in a way, is that we don't have a, it's not a science experiment, we don't have a control, right? So I don't know how Scramble's behaviour would have progressed if we hadn't tried it versus had.
And obviously with something like a hormone implant, that's a medical treatment done by an avian vet, and while it is something that I had asked, is this something that would be good to try, we were all in agreement that, yes, this was treatment that was indicated.
There were behavioural signs that told us that perhaps hormone amplification could be a source of stress in Scramble's day-to-day life, and a lot of the environmental factors that can contribute to that problem, such as high-energy diets and inappropriate handling, lots of sort of touching, petting and cuddling, those had never been factors for Scramble because they were things that I was aware of and mindful of.
And so we felt very much that that treatment option was indicated and we felt comfortable doing it. Like I mentioned, we saw some really big positives from that, and those positives have lasted beyond removing the implant. And again, we don't have a controlled Scramble. We don't know what that timeline would have looked like differently if we had left the implant in versus never put it in in the first place versus had it in for a time and then removed it.
But I think the one thing that I would just be mindful of in future is just knowing that it's not necessarily a treatment that might help and can't hurt. Obviously, in Scramble's case, we think it did hurt in a way, but I would still 100% be comfortable to have that discussion with a vet for another bird, just not for Scramble. Yeah, some awesome lessons there. Thanks for sharing that.
Because we've got a long list of things you've changed here, social enrichment, longer rest periods, diet evaluations, upskilling, foraging skills. I think the concept of surrounding yourself with those. I like the saying surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you, but surrounding yourself with a good team of people, a good team of people that you trust and bring different knowledge, experience, and skills to the table.
We had the collar that you put on, the Elizabethan collar, which I am enjoying thinking about the list of other podcasts, thinking about what that looks like for a bird this size of Scram compared to their experiences with Elizabethan collars.
We've had the hormone replacement and the importance of having that conversation with your vet and the value that you've had from having done that in terms of understanding how it could be helpful, but it could also have X, Y, Z side effects, but how you do that again and how that's something that is individual to each case and team and animal. The other thing that we haven't really dived and unpacked more was Lee's suggestion, shout out to Lee Stone, about cognitive training.
Can you explain to those listening, when we're saying cognitive training in this podcast episode, what we're talking about? Because you could say, well, all training is cognitive training, but there's more specificity and nuance to what you're talking about, isn't there?
Yeah. I guess in Scramble's case, what I was looking for is what we had been doing in our training sessions was almost repetitions of skills that he found quite easy, so things that he could do again and again with relatively little thought. And to be honest, it's not that fun for him or for me. There's only so many repetitions you can do of something that's already well mastered. So what we were looking for were things that would get the wheels turning in Scramble's brain a little bit more.
And that also meant that I had to think a little bit more, so it took a little bit more, I guess, training session design on my part to come up with challenges that he could meet that we could also build and develop over time to increase that challenge as he became more skilled. So, I mean, one of the skills that I started to work on, which I had previously taught our Greenwing McCaw, I decided to teach Scramble a retrieve behaviour, so I wanted him to pick up an object.
And initially the goal was for him to bring it to my hand, but as members of the Animal Training Academy community know, we had to do some troubleshooting to find ways to make this task clearer for Scramble. And so really during the period from late July until now, we've been looking at ways to break down this behaviour of picking up an object and bringing it to a target so that Scramble could understand, and it's been one of the most interesting training challenges that I've had.
So initially Scramble learned quite seemingly easily to pick up a little plastic ring and to drop it into just the lid from a jam jar, which I had put on our little training station. And I was thinking to myself, fantastic, this bird can retrieve. But if I put the ring anywhere except the right of the lid, as Scram was looking at it, he couldn't do it. So he could only flick the ring from the right to the left. And we sort of broke it down.
So I started to look at, well, how can I teach him that it's about the lid? And we introduced a little target inside the lid so that he was learning the skill of touch the target and then adding the plastic ring back in, pick up the ring and touch the target. Initially that still seemed not to help. I was able to change where the ring was in relation to the lid just by fractions, so a little bit forward, a little bit back, a little bit forward, a little bit back.
And eventually we did have the breakthrough where he could flick it from the other side of the lid in. But it still seemed a little bit like good luck rather than good planning that Scramble was getting this plastic ring into the lid. We didn't work on it every day. We were working on other skills as well. So Scramble learned how to stand on a little wooden block as a station.
He learned how to go around to the left and the right on a little like plastic cone essentially if anyone's ever trained a dog to send out around a cone in either direction. I was doing this in miniature with Scramble. He's learned to do other skills like shake hands. We've been working on a little bit of voluntary restraint with the hope that we'll be able to use it for physical exams, which we're getting close to.
But still every now and again I would bring back the retrieve and we could flick it from side to side. We could get it in the lid. But I was just not happy that he was just still not quite. I wanted him to place it in there. I wanted him to seemingly really understand it is about putting the ring in the lid, not throwing it and praying.
And what I noticed actually just a few weeks ago was that the piece that was really missing was Scramble could pick up the ring, but he wasn't walking while he was holding this plastic ring. And so what I started to work on with him was building some movement towards the ring. So using that little target inside the jam lid, I started to build some reinforcement history for Scram running from the end of his little training mat across the mat to touch the target.
And then I would reward him at the back of the mat again. And we would repeat that. And I found that when I added his little plastic ring back in, in the path that he was running on, that he was starting to pick up the ring and place it in the lid. Still when I changed the position of the lid or the position of the ring slightly, we'd see the behaviour break down. So it was really interesting to see what he was understanding versus what I thought he was understanding.
But again, just like with the initial challenge of him flicking the ring from just one side, I was able to change it little by little until in the past week we've seen the major breakthrough where he can run to pick up the ring from the front of the mat and turn around and carry it to the back of the mat to put it in that little lid, regardless of where that little lid is.
So that's an example, I guess, of where it's taken a lot of time, but at each step along the way, it's posed an interesting challenge for both myself and for Scramble. And because the goal with the training was to offer Scramble that, I guess, that puzzle, that cognitive challenge, the fact that the skill hasn't been finished all this time, it's never really mattered. Each day that we've turned up at the little training station, we've met our goal of working on this puzzle together.
And I guess now that he is carrying that ring really confidently towards the lid, we're going to have to think of something else to work on. But that's an example that we've had where we've been looking to offer a challenge and a puzzle in order to keep Scramble's little brain turning and ticking along and hopefully nice and happy and occupied. Well, I just thought of something you can teach Scram, and that is building his foraging skills.
You can teach him to pick something up, put it in a bowl of water to help soften it so he can forage on it. I don't know what that something is. My brain was going, these skills are so helpful because it's not just about teaching Scram. In this context, you can pick up a blue thing and put it in this lid. It's about teaching Scram. You can pick things up and put them in things. Well, I was going to say, putting things in water comes very naturally to conures.
I think anyone who has fed their conure or potentially any of their, our macaws and our amazons do it too. If you've fed them formulated diets like pellets, they're pretty good at dipping it in water. But definitely thinking about, you almost need a little birdie vending machine. You can put something in a slot and have a treat come out. But I might need an engineer to design that for me. Steve, you're on.
It makes me think as well that we've been talking about cognitive training and in terms of what does that mean? It means that we're really getting Scram to think. That's something that we can't necessarily measure. We can see in observable behaviors like slight pauses or flinches when Scram goes to do something that he's previously done, but realizes that it doesn't result in reinforcement anymore. So after that pause, he does the right thing.
So we can operationalize it with examples like that, but also problem solving to really get Scram using his brain. So that was a really cool example. And now I'm thinking as well, it'd be fun thinking about what you just shared in terms of the natural history of conures and some behaviors we see from that species. I wonder if you could train the same behavior of a different object in a different context.
So train the same behavior, but in a different way by trying to get capturing with something that Scram already does. That sounds to me like fun anyway. Before we finish up, I want to acknowledge, Belinda, that you and I talked about a couple of things we wanted to talk about in the episode today before we push recorded. We haven't talked about any of them, but that's okay. It's cool, isn't it? I'm not sure how much there is to talk about a specific challenge and specific topic.
But of course we need to share with everyone before we wrap up where we are now. We've shared about the problem. We shared about the large amount of. Things you did with regard to the intervention to this problem. Where are we sitting in December? When we're recording this episode, because it's not coming out until January, where are we sitting now? Yeah, I was thinking of that as I was describing the training I was doing with Scramble. Where are we now?
When we put the collar on Scramble in, I think it was March or April this year, the hope was that that collar would be on Scramble for about two to three weeks while his skin healed and then would be able to take the collar off and carry on. That wasn't the case at all. Each time that we tried to remove the collar, he would damage his skin again. I think we saw that happen two or three times. He was also still doing some feather plucking while he was wearing the collar.
So he was quite creative in the different ways that he could hold his body so that he could reach his wings and also his legs and lower belly. He was able to pluck while wearing the collar. But obviously during this time, I was changing some of the environmental factors and I was starting to incorporate more training challenges and foraging challenges for Scramble. And then I was working with Dr. Kat to try and support Scram also with medication.
And what we started to see was that he was doing less feather plucking on those areas that he could reach. And at the point that his little legs were fully feathered, so they had grown pin feathers, instead of plucking those pin feathers, he had preened those feathers and he had lovely full pantaloons. At that point, I was feeling quite hopeful that we could remove the collar. So we tried, we removed the collar and I supervised him throughout one day and then left him overnight.
And then before we knew it, it had been a week and then a month. And he has been out of collars now since August. So that's a really good outcome. In terms of his social and foraging behaviour, he is greatly improved. So he spends a lot of time obviously interacting with Savvy, my green-cheeked conure. They still are housed together very comfortably. He spends a great deal of each day foraging.
Without his collar on, he bathes pretty much every day, I'd say probably five out of seven days, which keeps his skin and feathers nice and healthy. We haven't been able to reduce his feather plucking to zero yet. So he particularly is still plucking underneath his wings and on his lower belly. We've not seen it resume to as bad as it's been, but it's also not as good as it's been.
He's recently had reviews with his avian vet where we've been able to confirm that physically, except for the feather plucking, he seems to be in excellent health. His blood levels are all normal, which is really good news. Obviously, he's on quite a bit of medication at the moment. So that was something that we were mindful of and we wanted to make sure of, make sure that his body was coping well with that, which it is. And we've also had a recent review with our vet behaviourist.
And in doing that, we've been able to look back at some, I guess, some records that I've been keeping to see that periods of the day where he's most seemingly uncomfortable, agitated or most likely to do some feather plucking, we've been able to adjust his medications to better support him in those periods. So we're a couple of weeks post that now. I am seeing some feathers regrowing in areas that he had been removing them from.
And obviously, we're seeing some recent training breakthroughs as well with some of the little skills and tasks that we're working on. So I'm optimistic. And yeah, we keep working to support him as best that I'm able. Well, I think you're very able. I think it's amazing what you've done. I think it's amazing what you are doing.
And I'm so glad that we, again, could use this platform, this podcast to share about this to be continued story with Scram, you and everyone else you've mentioned today, Scram's team. Also want to acknowledge that you've been brave today, in my personal opinion, in sharing with us. We've talked about Scram, obviously, and the challenge of feather destructive behaviour.
But we've also talked about how that felt as a professional trainer to have an animal that was experiencing these challenges and some of the hurdles you had to overcome in terms of embarrassment, frustration. So thank you for your bravery in sharing everything that you've shared with us today. Just before we do officially wrap up, because I could just keep talking and asking questions, but I think we've exceeded the length of a normal ATA podcast episode. So we will officially wrap up.
But just before we do, can you remind, or can you, I guess we haven't mentioned it yet, can you tell everyone where they can go to find you online? And if anyone here has any questions for you, are they free to reach out to you? And how might they do that? Yeah, absolutely. I'm always happy to chat to people who are interested in training and behaviour. And if I can offer any support or advice, I'm glad to. You can contact me through my website, which
is www.treatplaylove.com.au. Or you can find me at Treat Play Love Training on Facebook, where I don't update my socials as frequently as I probably should. But you can definitely contact me there, and I'll get back to you ASAP. Because you're too busy in the ATA members -only community, sharing all of your awesome training in there with us, which we really appreciate. We will, of course, link to all of that in the show notes for you, the listener.
And I'm so glad we got to do this from myself and on behalf of everyone listening. We really appreciate you taking the time to come and hang out with us on the show. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ryan. And thank you so much for listening as well. This is your host, Ryan Cartlidge, signing off from this episode of the Animal Training Academy podcast show. We hope today's conversation inspired you and equipped you with new tools for your trainer's toolbox.
Remember, every challenge in training is an opportunity to learn and sharpen your animal training geekery. Embrace the rough patches, learn from them, and keep improving. And don't forget, the path to growing your skills and expanding your knowledge continues beyond this episode. Visit www.atamember.com to join our supportive membership, where you will find a community of trainers just like you.
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