I’ve seen several threads here on raising birds, and linked articles as well, and invariably they all say “Don’t punish a bird for biting or other undesirable behavior, distract it instead. Birds don’t understand punishment”.
Why will a punishment-reward feedback loop work with most other creatures to direct behavior, except for birds? Some birds like African Gray parrots are reputed to be fairly intelligent and long lived, why wouldn’t punishment-reward behavior conditioning like that used on cats and dogs work on them?
I am not a vet or bird psychologist, but in my experience, parrots, say, like attention and also have twisted senses of logic and cause and effect. Any attention is good-- good or bad. So if you do anything interesting as a result of, say, it shrieking, it thinks it’s awesome-- so much better than being ignored, so the next time it’s bored it will shriek to get a reaction again. If it bites and you stick it in a dark room, the next time it wants to take a nap it will bite. They’re more like 2-year old humans than dogs, but also very physically fragile and barely domesticated–like, one or two generations from the jungle–and they hold grudges and various other side effects that make honey better than vinegar in convincing them one way or another in behavior. Plus, if you start yelling “no!”. . . yeah, they are just like two year old kids.
(owner of a bird who, when he’s pissed off, with no hint of irony tells you some combination of, “No, Murphy, bad bird, you’re being naughty, step up, no bite.”)
Hmm…sadly I left the book at home, so I can’t give an exact cite, but just this morning I was reading a Stephen Gould essay about experiments testing the intelligence of monotremes by seeing how quickly they learn various patterns to get food. As an aside he mentioned that birds score very poorly on these tests, considerably worse as a group then mammals.
Granted that’s teaching by rewarding behavior rather then punishing it, put I imagine the two are related.