African grey parrot training

Those who are new to the idea of having an African Grey as a pet first of all need to understand that regardless of a parrot’s species they’re not exactly like a dog or a cat, meaning that they’re not domesticated animals. Even if a parrot has been hatched in a cage under human supervision it’s quite dissimilar to a pup or a kitten in that it only relies on its instinct. Especially if you acquire a young bird the entire weight of properly training it will fall on your shoulders and you need to be patient, attentive and caring with your bird in order to get good results.

The African Grey is probably the most intelligent of all the parrot species and because of its uncanny ability of imitating a large variety of sounds around it as well as the fact that some of them have been shown to associate words with numbers and shapes, scientists consider the African Grey to have an intellect equal to that of a three year old human child. This means that the African Grey is a very interactive, intelligent and adaptable creature which you can train with the right amount of time, care and patience.

If you get a young bird then you’ll be working with a blank slate and one of the best ways of teaching it certain words is through demonstrating with another human being.

Let’s assume that you want to teach your African Grey to say the word “apple” when you plan on giving it an apple. The first thing you do is bring a friend in the room and sit them close to the parrot. Then you show your friend the apple and say “Apple”; you need to have your friend botch the first few attempts by saying things like “app” and then after saying “apple” correctly you reward them with the actual apple. Then you can try it with your parrot, if its reluctant to do it, do the example with your friend again, much like a three year-old child the parrot will become jealous and say the word in order to get the reward.

Of course that’s only one example, you need to be aware that an African Grey will analyze any sound it hears from you and his environment and try to imitate it whether it’s the sound or songs of other birds, or your microwave oven ding and doorbell, everything is fair game when it comes to what they imitate, so if you use certain words all of the time they will pick them up and start using them as well. Of course you can use this to teach it to say fun things, or useful things like your phone number for instance, in case the parrot ever flies away, but on the other hand if your vocabulary is significantly different when you’re alone as opposed to when you’re with company be prepared for your parrot to start spurting out all the most common swear words that you tend to use at the most inappropriate of times.