How to raise Backyard Chickens: [CHICKENS-101] Re: The Most Unusual Livestock Guardian

Here's a link to Chris Shanks' Cockatoo Downs:

http://www.cockatoodowns.com/our-cockatoos.html

You can see she free flies quite small parrots.

She holds a training workshop/retreat every year and uses chickens to teach her students. Chickens are used in a lot of training workshops. I suspect they are used so often because they don't have much of a personal relationship with people, unlike dogs and parrots. With a chicken, you either get the timing of the click right or you don't and the chicken will show you pretty quickly by what behavior you ultimately train, which is the behavior you reward. If the timing isn't perfect, a trainer will reward a different behavior than the behavior they believe they reward.

Janet

--- In CHICKENS-101@yahoogroups.com, Jennifer Fleishman <jmfleishtoo@...> wrote:
>
> Yep, Chris is the one I was thinking of. I thought she was in Washington State. I think she's had Cockatoos free for nearly three decades and her record is pretty amazing.
>
>
> Jen and the flock
> http://www.birdiedebutantes.com/
> http://www.tntbirdtoys.com/