Hello and welcome to episode 3 of Animale Therapie, the podcast that popularises animal behaviour.
Today we’re going to talk about the myths surrounding free flight. If you’re passionate about free flight and would like to take the plunge one day, but have a lot of questions, I’ve created a Masterclass on the subject which is completely free and will take place on Tuesday 26 September at 6pm live. You’ll find the link to register at the bottom of the page. Don’t hesitate to have a look.
My story
I personally started free flying in 2010, as I wouldn’t advise anyone else to do, i.e. on my own, without the guidance of a professional to point me in the right direction and give me their point of view. Although at the time I was lucky enough not to lose any birds or have any accidents, with hindsight and the successive training courses I’ve done since then, and all the knowledge I’ve accumulated, I now know that the risk of loss or accident was extremely high. Although the risk is never absolutely zero in any case, there are ways of limiting this risk through an in-depth knowledge of behaviour, but also a more specific knowledge of your bird, because every bird is different.
And as is often the case, practices that can make people dream also have their share of myths to accompany them. Knowing how to detect these myths, which are based on nothing more than beliefs, is the first step towards considering the practice in the right way, and that’s precisely what today’s topic is about.
The myths
First myth. If my bird lives in a cage all year round, can I take it for a walk with me? In fact, you could put it another way. If the living environment I offer my bird isn’t 100% suited to its needs, will offering it free flight be enough? Actually, no. The first point I wanted to make with you, and perhaps the most important, is that free flight is not an alternative to a quality living environment for the bird. I think that’s fairly easy to understand, even instinctively. If you have a bird living in a very small, uninteresting cage, with no enrichment, and you open the cage and give it the chance to go out into a very rich, super-stimulating environment, then there’s a risk that it won’t want to fly, Then there’s the risk that it won’t want to come back because there are so many things to do outside, so many things that it simply doesn’t have in its usual environment. Do you think your bird will be motivated to come back to you? Do you think that if you call him back at that moment, even if he’s familiar with calling back in an unstimulating context, there’s the slightest chance that he’ll come back to you at that moment? There’s very little chance because the external environment is ultra-stimulating and there are so many things to do. If someone tells me that a game is coming to an end and asks me to come back, I’m certainly going to drag my feet and come back. What’s more, in a free-flight context, you have to understand that your bird is completely free at that point. In fact, the word is in the title. Free flight: it’s free. That’s the difference, in fact: at that moment, our bird is completely in control of its decisions and its choices. Our aim is to make sure that it wants to come back to us. Offering it a suitable environment in captivity is the first step in making it want to come back. That’s where it all starts. By offering it a suitable living environment, you are laying the foundations for motivating it to want to come back to you, because it will feel good at your side, because it won’t have the impression that something is being taken away from it as soon as it enters a cage or an aviary.
Finally, if I had to put it another way, free flight would only be a bonus in the life of a bird that already has a full life, an enriched life in a living space that is adapted to its morphology and its species. Can you imagine taking your bird out after leaving it at home for eight hours on its own in its cage, with nothing around it to amuse it, no enrichment, no toys, no things to enable it to satisfy the inherent needs of its species? I strongly advise against taking your bird out. It’s not even that I advise against it, it’s that it’s absolutely forbidden. Quite simply because your bird is going to go out, and there’s a good chance that when it does, it simply won’t want to come back. And that’s where it becomes clear that, in the end, free flight isn’t just about teaching your bird to recall. You also have to cultivate motivation. You also have to cultivate the reasons that will make it want to come back.
Another point I’d like to make is that free flight is not wandering. People often confuse the fact of finally opening the cage and leaving the bird free, for example in the garden or around the house, with free flight. This is not free flight. Free flight is the practice of taking your bird out under supervision, being there with it at the time, and having a minimum of control over what happens at all times. Wandering means not being present, not keeping an eye on your bird, the things it might encounter, where it might go. That, in fact, is wandering. And in the end, it exists. I call it wandering because that’s what it refers to, for example, when you take your dog for a walk and your dog is completely free and wanders very far from its owner or escapes from home. That’s what we call wandering. The legal definition is that the dog is more than 100 metres from its owner or home. This is the current legal definition of wandering for domestic animals. For the moment, this does not apply to parrots.
But aren’t there lessons to be learned? I think there are. And today, wandering does exist. There are certain centres that practice it, there are things that are done around it, but in this case, it’s simply called semi-liberty. Semi-liberty means letting a bird roam free, but still taking care of certain aspects of its life, such as looking after its veterinary care, bringing it in at night or simply feeding it. Making sure it has everything it needs. That’s semi-liberty. But in this case, the bird is completely left outside. The risk of it being caught by predators is really high. In fact, it’s as great as if the bird were part of any other species in your current environment. For example, if you live in France, the risk of it being caught by a bird of prey is as great as for any other bird of prey living in our latitudes. It is in this sense that I believe that wandering or semi-liberty, call it what you will, should not be practised in a free-flight context.
You really mustn’t confuse the two. Because our aim when we practice free flight, even if it’s such an important and intense activity, is to minimise the risks to our birds as much as possible. Because we are taking a risk, and we have to be aware of that risk and minimise it as much as possible. You can’t afford to let your bird roam around all day without looking after it, by closing the windows or worse, by simply leaving the house. Because the risk is that it will end up being spotted by birds of prey that are in the area, and there are some in France today that can be predators, even on our largest species, even on macaws. Obviously, the risk is much greater with small species, but even with our large macaws, it’s also possible. So it’s a risk that can be minimised by reasoned and supervised free flight. Not to mention the ethical aspects, such as the fact that if your birds end up finding other sources of food, then they favour these sources of food and simply don’t come back to you and move inexorably away from their initial location, without you having the slightest control over them, and you’ll have less and less of them.
The risk is that they will compete with our native species and take over ecological niches. Although this is still widely debated in the scientific community today, I think it’s an unwritten rule not to put any more pressure on our ecosystems, which are already largely weakened by human activities. In the same category, wandering or semi-freedom means that our birds are much more likely to be exposed to the risks of disease that wild birds can carry. If, for example, our region is hit by avian flu, it’s easy to imagine that our birds will end up coming into contact with avian flu too. The more they are left free in the field, the greater the chance that they will come into contact with it if you are in an affected region. But if you take a measured, reasoned approach to free flying, you can simply choose not to expose your bird to this risk and simply not to take it out in the event of an alert for this disease, for example, among all the other diseases in your region.
I simply believe that our birds and wildlife should not be subjected to our desire to take our birds out. As responsible humans who simply want the best for our birds, it’s also our duty to take into account these elements surrounding the practice before even considering carrying it out.
Finally, we come to myth number 3. Free flight would be the culmination of the well-being of our captive birds. No. Free flight is not the culmination of the well-being of our captive birds. While this may be true or partially true, particularly for the largest species, free flight is not the only measure to take into account when seeking to achieve welfare for our captive birds. First of all, we need to make a clear distinction between welfare and good treatment. Well-treatment is more an absence of lack. For example, the fact that our bird does not lack water or food. It’s defined more as an absence of problems. For example, it’s not sick, so we make sure it stays healthy. That’s how we define it. Well-being goes a little further, because we also take into account the psychological aspect of well-being, its mental health, if you like.
So it goes a little bit further. And when we take into account the definition of well-being, the real scientific definition, as it involves this psychological notion, it also means that the perception of the individual, the perception he will have of an activity or anything else will be specific to him. So we can’t generalise that free flight is the ultimate goal or the Holy Grail for the well-being of our captive birds. And I would go even further. By wanting to offer your bird the best in free flight, because you’ve heard it, because it’s been said to you, you run the risk of getting it into trouble. Maybe free flight isn’t for him, or maybe at this stage in his life, it’s not yet the right time to take up free flight, maybe because he’s poorly trained, maybe because his life history doesn’t allow it. There are a multitude of factors that could mean that for this particular bird, at this particular time in its life, it would be completely inappropriate.
Free flight involves taking your bird out into an environment that is very intense and full of stimuli. I’ll take a very simple example. When you have a bird that has come out of very difficult conditions. You know, if you recover, for example, an Amazon that has lived for ten years in very complex living conditions. It stayed in a very small cage all its life. He hardly ever went outside. You can imagine that people simply didn’t have the time, or maybe it was an old man and he didn’t have the time to look after it at all. Immediately plunging this bird into an environment full of stimuli when it was used to being in a hypo-stimulating environment risks doing exactly the opposite, risks creating distress. So the risk of loss is very high. That’s the first thing. But you can also imagine a bird that is totally dazed, totally apathetic in this new environment, that can no longer fly, and so doesn’t fly. That would be a possibility, it happens too.
I often hear ‘My bird can’t fly, so I’m taking it outside’. That way he’s happy, he can see what’s going on. And sometimes, if you look a little more closely at the body language, you can see that the bird is actually in distress because there is suddenly a multitude of stimuli that are very difficult for it to cope with. He’s not used to it at all. Even if you tried to desensitise him slowly and gently when he first came to you, it’s very difficult because real life is full of stimuli. And it’s true that life in a house doesn’t represent everything you might encounter outside. And so, even if this bird is well treated, because you make sure it’s well treated, because you offer it everything it needs physically, if we forget this psychological factor, if we don’t carry out a case study and if we don’t take an interest in what it’s like for this particular bird, the risk of making a mistake is high. And so, every time we consider a practice, whatever it may be, we’re always going to look at this first, at “and is this bird happy with it?
And that’s the first thing to consider, even before saying to yourself, in a general way, ‘Free flight is the culmination of well-being for our birds’. Because that may not be the case for yours. In fact, if you’ve been made to feel guilty because you didn’t take your birds out free-flying, you can simply stop feeling guilty. You can simply stop listening to these speeches, which are based on nothing but beliefs.
In the myth category too, I often hear that an old bird will never be able to get out. I’m making a bit of a connection with what I said earlier about the fact that, for example, a bird that has come out of mistreatment or, without necessarily talking about mistreatment, a bird that has not been in living conditions appropriate to its needs for a certain number of years. So, in the end, can an elderly bird be released into free flight? Well, it depends. It depends on a lot of things. It’s not such a binary answer, it’s not a yes or no, it depends. An elderly bird can be released for free flight if and only if – and this will often be true – it has had rigorous training beforehand, during which its abilities have been assessed, it has been enabled to acquire new skills and it has been desensitised to many things.
We also managed his emotions and allowed him to evolve gradually and harmoniously so that he had the necessary foundations to be able to go out in conditions as “extreme” or in any case as stimulating as free flight can be. But it’s true that training a bird that has been in very difficult living conditions before in its life, without necessarily talking about a bird that has come out of mistreatment, a bird that has been in living conditions that were not appropriate to its needs, so a very small cage that has never had the opportunity to practise flying, even without talking about abseiling, simply flying in its environment, for this bird, it will be much harder. But it doesn’t really depend on the bird’s age, but rather on the conditions it has lived in throughout its life. For example, you could have a 30-year-old bird that has lived in a huge aviary all its life, and is at the top of its physical and mental capacities, that has confidence in itself and its wings, and that would be a perfectly suitable candidate for free flight, as opposed to a four-year-old bird that would already be badly damaged by unsuitable captive living conditions, and the training that would ensue would certainly be much longer and much more difficult.
So, if I had to sum up this myth, we could say that while age is important, because it can give an indication of the individual’s adaptability, what is much more revealing is the life history of the bird throughout its life and the skills it already possesses. I talk about all this anyway in my training on the foundations of free flight to try to minimise the risks as much as possible and to try to detect, precisely, what will make a bird a good candidate for free flight or not, by taking all these criteria into account.
Another myth I often hear is that you don’t need a relationship to get a bird out. And yet it does. Why? First of all, we need to define exactly what a relationship is from a strictly behavioural point of view. What is the behavioural definition of a relationship? It’s the sum of all the positive reinforcements between two individuals. In other words, for example, if you have things going on that are very pleasant for an individual, then your relationship is likely to be a good one.
And what does it lead to when you accumulate very positive situations with a bird? It builds confidence. Trust is a very important criterion in free flying. Your bird has to be able to see you as a reference point rather than as something it sometimes thinks “Yes, sometimes she’s nice. Yes, but sometimes she’s mean”. Because if he doesn’t have 100% confidence in you, if there isn’t a good relationship between you, the risk that the day your bird gets into trouble, chooses not to come back to you, chooses to go to the safety of a tree, for example, is much greater. It won’t do everything, of course, but if you cultivate a positive relationship, by putting the odds on your side, by creating situations, by doing exercises that will lead to positive reinforcement with this individual, you will cultivate your relationship of trust and there is a much greater chance that, in a difficult situation, your bird will choose to come back to you rather than try to seek comfort in its environment.
It’s also one of the reasons why if our bird, for example, takes flight, if you’re its reference point outside, there’s every chance that it will decide if it can manage… Obviously, you need resilience in the face of immediate fear. The fear has to be able to subside quickly… You have to learn how to manage it, how to lower your emotions as quickly as possible. And that’s one of the reasons why free flying isn’t so simple after all. It’s not just a question of recall, you also have to learn how to manage your emotions, how to do things the right way. And we can also see that the relationship criterion, the trust criterion, is important because it will enable you, once again, to minimise the risks. If you have to pay attention to your bird’s emotions, if you have to pay attention to your bird’s relationship with you, if you have to pay attention to the environment you offer your bird, it’s pretty easy to see that free flight is not just a question of learning how to rappel.
Free flight is much more systemic, in fact. We’re going to get to the heart of the relationship, to the heart of an individual’s life and perhaps, if the work is well done, we’ll be able to take them on a bonus exercise that will be the exercise of free flight. But in the end, there are a lot more points to take into account than simply learning recall stupidly and spitefully. To give you an example of a relationship that can be cultivated, it could simply be, in the first instance, and this is perhaps a fundamental criterion: don’t punish your bird as you would punish a child as you would punish a dog. In our very punitive society, as soon as someone does something wrong, we want to point the finger at it. And yet, I can assure you that learning can take place in other ways. You can teach someone to improve, to do better, and you don’t have to point the finger at their mistakes. And the same is true for our birds. You can teach them, you can encourage them to succeed, and that will give them confidence in themselves and in us, and consequently improve their desire and motivation to work with us.
These are aspects that I discuss in the ‘Foundations of Free Flight’ course, because for me they are absolutely fundamental to master. And where, finally, should you start learning for your bird? How do you cultivate this motivation? Motivation, in behaviour, is an aspect that is very difficult to master. How do you get your bird to be as reliable as possible in uncontrolled and uncontrollable living conditions, such as the environment outside, quite simply?
The last myth I’d like to mention is that a bird that has been raised by its parents will never be able to go out in free flight. First of all, we need to go into a few definitions here. A bird raised by its parents is a bird that has been with its parents until weaning, if possible until psychological weaning (and I think I’ll do another episode on this subject). This is often contrasted with a bird that has been raised by hand, by the hand of man at a young age. It depends. You can take a bird from the nest when it’s just hatched, you can take it when it’s 15 days old, you can take it a little later, you can even take it while it’s still an egg.
In any case, hand rearing is just a way of describing a weaning technique. That’s all there is to it. But the bird will come into contact with humans very early on, whereas a bird that has been raised by its parents will only come into contact with humans when it leaves the nest, i.e. when it begins its weaning phase. We often imagine that a bird that has been raised by hand is necessarily tame and we imagine that a bird that has been raised by its parents is necessarily a bird that is absolutely not tame. So, in order to know exactly what we’re talking about, I’m going to have to define what taming is.
Taming means giving an individual confidence. If you remember what I’ve just said about the relationship, ultimately it’s the sum total of the positive reinforcements you can have with your bird over a certain period of time or over the course of an individual’s life. What also often happens is that we see taming as if there were a boundary between a bird being tamed and a bird not being tamed, as if there were no in-between.
And yet it’s a bit more complicated than that. Firstly, because the definition of tame changes depending on the person. Some people consider that a bird is tame because it lands on their shoulder. And there are others who consider that this is not enough to define whether a bird is tame or not. For example, I consider my lorises – they were all raised by their parents – to be tame. But I’m sure that if someone else works with them, it won’t work because I haven’t allowed them to generalise yet. They haven’t yet worked with other humans and so, for the moment, they only trust me. They don’t trust “humans”, they trust me because I’ve worked with them. And so, if someone tries to work with them, the risk is that they won’t realise the behaviours they’re used to doing with me. For example, coming on the hand is a behaviour we’ve worked on together. If another human asks them to come on the hand, chances are they won’t do it at all.
So, are they tame or not? That’s a real question. Personally, in my definition, I think so, but as it’s still a label, it will be different for everyone. Another more general example. If you have an amazon that knows how to sit on your hand, that knows how to sit on all human hands, that adores all humans, there’s no problem with that, but that doesn’t like having its head scratched, you can also imagine that if there are children walking by screaming, it’s going to be scared and it’s going to scream very loudly or perhaps flee, run away or suddenly get agitated in its cage, do we consider that the bird is tame or not? You could say yes and you could also say no. In fact, it depends on what you consider to be tame or not. Here, my definition of tame is a bird that trusts a human, that trusts that nothing will happen to it in relation to that human. We’ll never punish it. We will never try to hurt it. We won’t chase them. There are lots of things we’re not going to do. And in the end, the behaviours you work on with that bird will lead to a relationship that grows little by little.
You could imagine that you have a bird that knows how to do a step-up, you have a bird that has recall. You could imagine having trained that bird to enjoy cuddling. But you have to work at all this because it’s not necessarily acquired or innate in humans. To come back to the definition of a parent-reared bird and a hand-reared bird, you can have both. You can have a hand-reared bird that has immediately been put back with other birds and is not at all tame, that no longer knows how to behave towards humans, or even worse, a bird that has been hand-reared, but has often been forced, handled against its will, caught to be put in a transport cage, and that, in the end, is going to develop a fear of humans, no matter how hand-reared it is by humans.
On the other hand, we could also imagine a bird that has been raised by its parents, but which, on the other hand, is potentially going to have nothing but positive events in contact with humans, based solely on its consent, based solely on cooperation, and which will therefore also be completely tamed. So this really isn’t a story about a bird that’s raised by its parents or a bird that’s raised by hand. It’s really about taming and what we, with our etiquette, consider to be tame. In free flight, it all depends on how far you have to go in taming a bird to make it as safe as possible. As I was saying earlier in the relationship, it is absolutely essential that our bird trusts us, that it has confidence, that it can rely on things with us, by our side, that it already knows and that it can hold on to in the event of difficulty.
I’ll stop here this time, even though there’s so much more to say. It was very difficult to choose specific subjects to talk about, and what’s more, I have a tendency to digress.
If you’d like to find out more about this fascinating subject, I’ve put together a free Masterclass on the subject, which will take place live on Sunday 24 September at 2pm. Don’t forget, I’ve included the link at the bottom of the page. It’s now time to register and secure your place.
If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, don’t hesitate to comment. In the comments section, you can also suggest a topic that’s close to your heart.
You can also join my Instagram and Facebook for more information, tips and free resources under the animal therapy handle. Do you have a behavioural concern with your pet or would you like ethical and professional support? You can contact me directly at contact@animalethérapie.com. And I’ll see you very soon for a new episode.
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