Hello and welcome to episode 6 of the Animale Therapie podcast, the popular animal behaviour podcast. Today we’re going to talk about the impact of stress on hang-gliding. Stress is a particularly complex factor to manage and is difficult to detect if you don’t have the right tools. My aim with this episode is to give you the keys to detecting it, but also to anticipating the problems it could bring. But first, I have to tell you that if you’re interested in hang-gliding, whether it’s for regular practice or because, without even wanting to practice, you want to prevent the risk of loss, I’ve created a complete two-month training course with around 50 hours of learning and practice to do. It starts on 2 October and there are only a few places left. You can click here to access the course, so don’t hesitate to take a look!
Before we go any further, I need to explain what exactly is stress? Because it’s true that we use this word a lot, without really being able to put our finger on what it is, and above all, what form it takes.
Before even considering answering the question, I need to explain exactly what stress is. Of the various categories of stress we can encounter, the first is what we call good stress or eustress. You may already have heard of this term. Good stress refers to experiences that will be challenging, but in the long term, will be beneficial for the individual. It’s a form of reward. For example, in a typical human case, a wedding is good stress in that it asks us to think about lots of things, it pushes us to our limits. We can also be stressed by the experience, we can be stressed by the preparation, by the wedding itself, but it will result in something positive. There’s no such thing as a negative experience. That’s why we call it an experience that “challenges” us, that pushes us to our limits, but we’re perfectly capable of managing situations and even choosing them. That’s what we call good stress. Good stress poses absolutely no problems and can really lead to something very positive for the individual.
Then there’s what we call tolerable stress. Here, on the other hand, it’s no longer a “challenging” experience, it’s no longer an experience we’re going to choose. It’s going to be a negative experience that’s going to stress us out, but one that we’re still going to be able to manage. Because we have the tools, because we’re physically capable, mentally capable, because we have those abilities as individuals. It really varies from one individual to another and from one theme to another: we don’t all have the same sensitivity to the same things, and that can result in learning that will help us grow. For example, it’s a bit sad to talk about it, but if I were to take a typically human experience, for example the death of a friend or family member, it’s a negative experience. It’s something that may take a while to get over, but it can, and I mean can, result in something that will help us grow. We’ll be able to cope with the situation for different reasons, we’ll use different levers, but it’s a negative experience from which we’ll eventually recover, not everyone, because it depends, of course, but once again, this is an example of tolerable stress that will change. There may very well be people for whom that same experience is no longer tolerable stress, but is really extremely negative, to the point where we live with it. You’re going to be able to cope with the situation for different reasons, you’re going to use different levers, but it’s a negative experience for which you’ll eventually get through it, not everyone, because it depends, of course, but here again, it’s an example of tolerable stress that’s going to change. There may well be people for whom that same experience will no longer be tolerable stress, but will be really extremely negative, to the point where you end up with, and this is my last type of stress: toxic stress.
Toxic stress is also a negative experience that causes a great deal of stress, but in this case you’re unable to deal with it. You can no longer cope with the situation. Either because the intensity of the stressful events, the triggers or the frequency of exposure to these triggers, will be too great, or because you lack the strategy to manage and cope with the situation, or because you’ve already experienced other stresses or other factors. In any case, what we need to understand is that in the event of toxic stress, we are no longer able to cope with the situation. And what I’d also like to stress is that a negative experience and the intensity we feel is really unique to each individual. Each individual will perceive the experience according to their own vision, and all visions are OK. We can’t say to ourselves that such and such a thing isn’t very serious because we don’t consider it to be very serious, but perhaps the neighbour next door is going to find it extremely complicated to deal with, for something that seems totally ordinary to us. If I were to go back to birds now, it could be, for example, a bird that has enormous difficulty coping with, I don’t know, barking or human beings. As far as this bird is concerned, it’s never known humans or it’s had very negative experiences with humans, so for it, if we expose it to humans, it’s going to be very complicated. We may be exposing it to toxic stress without really realising it because we’re thinking ‘No, it’s a human like any other, there’s no problem’, but perhaps for this bird, with the experiences it has had in its life, we may be creating toxic stress. Where perhaps, for another bird, it would have been a completely positive experience or even just good stress because we’re going to ask it to do a few tricks, we’re going to ask it to manage a situation, it’s perfectly capable of managing it, there’s no problem, it has all the tools for that.
So what I want to highlight is that the same event, the same stimulus in the environment can be perceived totally differently depending on the individual. And it doesn’t matter how we interpret the situation, how we feel about it, all that matters is how that individual perceives the situation. What I’d really like you to bear in mind, because it’s really important, is that it’s not the stress trigger itself that’s important. It’s not the trigger itself that’s toxic, that’s good, that’s tolerable, not at all. The only thing we need to understand is how this individual will perceive the situation. And we can’t determine what’s going on just by how we interpret it, only by how the individual feels.
And what you have to understand is that stress is never faked. It never is. Nor should it be minimised. If you see your bird struggling with a situation, it’s because there may have been an event or a context or one or more triggers that caused it to be in this state, and it’s absolutely not faking it. What’s also important to understand is that toxic stress short-circuits our ability to reason. Basically, the behaviours that result from exposure to these triggers, which themselves provoke stress, are going to be absolutely automatic. For example, if you have a bird that is not in a free-flight environment, i.e. in an aviary or a cage at home, you can imagine that it will start screaming, trying to escape, flying everywhere. That’s the type of behaviour we can observe. These are automatic behaviours. And at such times, what we can observe is that no matter how hard we try to reason with our bird, nothing works. It’s as if he’s lost his brain, that we can no longer control the situation and that he can no longer control his own behaviour. At that point, all he cares about is escaping the trigger.
We’re not going to give you a neuroscience lecture either, but what I do want you to understand is that stress radically changes the way in which information is processed by the brain. The impact of immediate stress is that it short-circuits our immediate learning capacities. Basically, we won’t be able to learn anything. All we’re going to do are the automatic behaviours we already know at that point in our lives. This can change depending on an individual’s life. But also, and above all, there’s something I haven’t mentioned yet, which is that exposure to tolerable or toxic stress repeatedly, several times or every day for several days, weeks or even months, without you even realising it, can lead to what we call chronic stress. The problem with chronic stress is that if the brain is exposed to stress on a truly repetitive basis, as is the case in this type of context, then it will really affect the individual’s cognitive functions.
On the other hand, we’re going to come up against another problem, which is that we’re going to find it increasingly difficult to reduce our fears. The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex will be affected. These are the areas that generally manage memory. If I had to sum it up, basically it manages cognitive abilities. If these areas are affected, for an individual who has been under chronic stress for several weeks, months or even years, it’s going to be very complicated to recover all their cognitive abilities. Similarly, if the amygdala is affected, it is strongly impacted during episodes of stress, and there may be a greater potential later on to develop behavioural problems. If the prefrontal cortex is affected, you’re going to have more difficulty managing your emotions and you’re likely to be more impulsive. These are the kinds of things that are going to appear. And finally, and I think this is also the most important thing, if you have an animal that is under chronic stress, chances are it will shorten its life expectancy.
I don’t want to frighten you at all, because there are quite a few studies that have shown that even if you’ve had chronic stress for several years, if it finally stops after a while, the beneficial effects will be felt straight away and life expectancy will increase again. On this point, you shouldn’t be afraid either and really put your animal in a bubble, because in any case, you absolutely can’t protect your animal from all the stresses. It’s absolutely impossible. On the other hand, there are ways of managing the situation, giving him the skills, creating certain routines for certain animals and doing the training. And that’s perhaps the most important thing: always depending on what he’s capable of doing in terms of his sensitivity and emotions. Because each animal will have a different background, will have a different development, will have a different life history, will have a different history from another, will have a different personality too.
In short, all this will affect the way you manage your emotions and your sensitivity. You have to take that into account when you do training. To come to the point of today’s episode: all this has to be taken into account when learning to free-fly and, by extension, in the way the individual responds to stress when free-flying. The more we know about our bird’s points of difficulty, its sensitive points, the better we’ll be able to anticipate when practising something as dangerous as hang-gliding, because there’s always a risk. So getting to know your bird better, getting to know its sensitivities better, getting to know its difficulties better will enable you to anticipate, to create an environment that is suited to this individual and above all will enable you to modulate the difficulty to which you expose it in its life and in its practice of free flight. Of course, in the space of just one episode, there’s absolutely no time to go into it all. I talk about it much better in the course on the foundations of free flight, which I recommend to you. There’s very little space left, it’s super comprehensive. We talk about all this in much greater depth because I’m giving you a brief overview in the time we have today. But basically, our aim when we go free flying is to have this information too, because if you don’t have it and you don’t know your bird well enough, in the end you run the risk of having problems outside, free flying, with a bird that is likely, I don’t know, to get stuck on the top of a tree all the time. You’ll lose control, you won’t be able to call it back and in the end, you’ll really be in trouble. And so will he, in other words it will be a negative experience.
So now that it’s out in the open, it’s good to know that it exists, but our bird can’t tell us when it’s going to be in trouble, what kind of stress it’s feeling, and above all, it can’t give us a measurement scale. Of course it can’t. So what we’re going to have to do with our bird, and this is part of the training we do to learn to read him and know what his own limits are, and how we should also modulate the training we do and the way we propose training to our bird so that it’s adapted to him, not to another bird. Our aim will be to learn to read his body language.
How we read body language varies from one individual to another, from one species to another, from one personality to another and from one life history to another. In short, we all have the same dictionary. For example, all the blue-fronted Amazons, to take a very specific species, have the same dictionary, i.e. they have a form of innate body language. But there are also disparities between individuals: if you look at one blue-fronted Amazon and another blue-fronted Amazon who have had completely different experiences, their body language will be totally different from one individual to the next, depending on their experiences. And yet they’re the same species, so you might say that they’re similar. Yes, there will be similarities in certain aspects, but there will also be individual disparities that are important to take into account, because if we don’t pay attention to them, if we simply read a ready-made recipe for that species, we run the risk of making a mistake, because it may not be totally adapted to the individual and what it means to him.
That’s really important. You could have a bird which, for example, to take a stressful situation, at the moment you approach the hand, it will completely tense up, it will freeze. We’ll see a sort of freeze frame, a bit of a pause in time. And then we might say to ourselves ‘That’s it, he’s more or less coping’. And then there’s another person who’s going to feel exactly the same and who’s either going to flee or attack us directly. But does that say anything about the perceived intensity of the thing that’s scaring us? In this case, our approaching hand, does it say anything about the intensity? Well, this information isn’t enough to quantify the intensity of the stress felt as the hand approaches.
Basically, what you’re going to do is have the dictionary for your species, so that’s perfect. Then, for that individual, your aim will be to collect data. Note down all the elements of body language that you can observe on your bird and that will give you information when you start to see a sequence – always the same – appear. For example, your bird tensing up. Then, I don’t know, the eyes start to blink, with the pupils retracting and widening repeatedly. Then the bird starts to look back. This potentially means that it wants to flee. Sometimes the feathers will press against the body. In short, there are a huge number of body language elements that can be representative of how your bird is feeling. And the more you know about your bird in different contexts, the better you’ll be able to adapt to the situation and offer it things while it’s still connected to you, i.e. below its tolerance threshold. If you exceed the tolerance threshold, the threshold beyond which the bird can no longer cope at all, then you have a total loss of control. We have a total loss of control over the bird, but it too has a total loss of control over its own behaviour. I think you can see what I’m getting at and all the difficulties this can cause in free flying.
To sum up, there’s an enormous amount of work that needs to be done with our birds, and it’s all about reading and interpreting body language in the right way. At the outset, don’t put any interpretation on it. Just describe the elements of body language, the micro-behaviours, the micro-vocalisations that you might see on your bird in different contexts. Basically, you’re collecting data. That’s the first thing you have to do, even before putting an interpretation on it. Interpretation only comes later, depending on what’s happening in the environment. It can only come later, because you can’t draw conclusions solely on the basis of a micro element of body language, because you can have, I don’t know, a bird blinking in a totally different context, in a context of intimidation or in a context of excitement, or even positively. So this simple little element of body language is not in itself enough to tell us what the individual is feeling. That’s why I say, interpretation can only come later.
Now that we’ve said all that, I think you understand what I’m getting at when it comes to free flying. Because in practical terms, if our bird is exposed to immediate stress while we’re out free-flying, the immediate risk is that it will take flight. Automatic behaviour is both innate and sometimes acquired in some parrots. So the risk of flight is high. And if this stress continues, or if the bird has what we call a low resilience, i.e. a low capacity to recover quickly from its emotions, the risk is that it will continue its flight in a straight line and that, as a result, we will lose sight of it, that it will lose itself, because at such times, the brain was no longer in a position to analyse the situation. All it wants to do is flee as far as possible from the stressful element and so it runs the risk of getting lost and not being able to return to the place where you usually do your free flight, because it hasn’t analysed the area. He didn’t go there of his own free will, he wasn’t even conscious any more. In those moments, you really have to tell yourself, he’s completely short-circuited.
That’s really something you can see appearing in free flight. And flight, in any case, and as I was saying, all stresses are absolutely uncontrollable. You can’t control every element in the environment. You can’t put your bird in a bubble. It would be totally illusory to think that this is the case. However, you can prepare your bird to deal with these situations, and there are several ways of doing this. You can desensitise it to as many elements as possible that it is likely to encounter in the environment in which you want it to practice free flight. That’s the first thing. Then we can also work on what we call resilience and the ability to recover from an emotion as quickly as possible. That’s something you work on through progressive desensitisation, and I also talk about it in the training, because people often think ‘All you have to do is expose your bird to it regularly and it will eventually get used to it’, but in fact it’s not as simple as that. That’s something you have to work on gradually, and I also talk about it in the training course, because people often think, ‘All you have to do is expose your bird to it on a regular basis and it will eventually get used to it’, but in fact it’s not as simple as that. This desensitisation work can be very badly done, because it will be done by flooding, by immersion. It will be done beyond what the bird is capable of withstanding, and you can’t regulate emotions with more emotions. You have to expose your bird to an intensity that is low enough for it to be able to cope. Only then will the bird gradually calm down and be able to deal with the situation more and more effectively, while feeling perfectly neutral or even positive emotions towards the stimulus that previously provoked stress, flight and anxiety, whatever that may be.
Resilience is perhaps one of the most difficult things to work on, because depending on an individual’s life, and as I was saying earlier, their ability to recover from an event will be greatly affected by their background. The more complicated a bird’s life has been, the more chronic stress it has been exposed to, and sometimes even the inability to escape, the more learned helplessness it becomes. So I’m not going to talk about that today, because that’s another category, but I’m also going to talk about it in the training, because it’s also very important to take into account. And the longer a bird has been exposed to chronic stress in its life, the more likely it is to have had an impact on its cognitive abilities and therefore also on its ability to recover from negative events. In fact, what you need to do, and this is why the training course is called the ‘Foundations of Free Flight’, is also to work on ensuring that your bird is capable of managing its emotions as effectively as possible. And that’s something you have to work on through very specific training to achieve tolerance thresholds that are adapted to that individual. And so, obviously, there’s no recipe here, it can only be adapted to the individual’s own experience.
So of course, potentially, it will be much easier to work on a bird that is young, that has just been weaned, that is six months or a year old, than someone who is 14 years old, who has lived with chronic stress all his life, who is a rescue bird, who has not had his motor skills for a large part of his life. For that individual, it will be much more difficult, even if it’s possible one day to fully recover his abilities, as if he were a young bird. It’s quite possible that this won’t happen. We also have to be realistic about what science is telling us today. But in any case, being aware of this kind of thing allows us to anticipate events and prepare for them, and also to know whether free flying would be suitable for that individual, with a benefit/risk ratio that is as favourable as possible so that there is maximum benefit and minimum risk. And this brings me to another point.
If you have a bird that has had precisely these problems, many of them, or even none at all, but has been put into a free-flight situation too quickly, it may have been under stress, or a bird that has been badly prepared and is therefore potentially at risk of being subjected to a lot of external triggers, because there are a lot of things happening outside, when you go out, there are a lot of stimuli, so it’s likely to cause a lot of stress. The trick is to know whether this is the right kind of stress, i.e. whether it’s a positive experience for the individual and he’s totally capable of coping with it, and that he’ll grow from it and, as these positive experiences unfold, he’ll enjoy them and it’ll be a very positive experience for him. Or, on the contrary, are we systematically exposing the bird to repeated and repeated stress, because we absolutely want it to be able to go out in free flight and, in the end, we’re doing exactly the opposite, i.e. as the bird goes out, we’re creating more and more toxic stress and, as a result, anxiety, The bird anticipates going outside, it’s afraid of it, it starts screaming as soon as it’s about to go outside, for example, and this could be an element of body language that stands out. You could have hyper-vigilance with your bird who is not at all focused on you, who is totally focused on every rustle of leaves, on every thing that may fly, on every insect that passes by him, on pollen, dandelion flowers flying in the air, in short, who is going to be totally disorientated by his environment.
And indeed, the more elements there are to manage, the greater the risk of being totally overwhelmed by the flood of information to manage and the emotions that must also be managed at the same time. This really brings us to a problem, which is that free-flight outings, in this context, are absolutely no longer positive for the individual. There’s a risk that there might be, I don’t know, just one tiny trigger, a little more important than the others, for example a noise that’s going to be commonplace, that normally the bird is perfectly capable of coping with, but there, in the external context, it’s super difficult for it to manage. At that point, it will act as a trigger and the bird will potentially take flight. If it was already extremely stressed, or even chronically stressed, the difficulties in getting it to come back will be extremely significant. There’s also a risk that it will remain stuck in a tree for a very long time. And if it really doesn’t stop at all, the resilience will be close to zero and the chances of the bird managing to come back, to make a manoeuvre to get back to you at such times, to regain its senses, because a manoeuvre is cognitive work which is very important for a bird. So it requires an enormous amount of resources. And if all these resources are directed towards managing stress, managing emotions, escaping as far and as quickly as possible from this source of stress, then you can be sure that your bird won’t be coming back. And it’s really not because he doesn’t want to, it’s because he won’t be able to.
These are all things that absolutely have to be taken into account before you even consider taking up hang-gliding. It’s a question of “Does my bird have the necessary resilience, the right emotional management to be able to take part in this activity, in a way that is positive for it? Not just because I want to, but really because for that bird, it will be beneficial, because free flight is interesting in itself, it can be, but it can also be very dangerous, or even very unpleasant for the bird itself. So it’s also a question of assessing each individual bird.
Really, pay close attention to this. If there’s one recommendation I can give you, it’s that from now on you should learn to try to read your bird, even if you’ve been living with it for 10, 15, 30 years. Really, start reading it again as thoroughly as possible, even if it means drawing up a plan, writing it down, colour-coding it. When you know roughly what zone you’re in, really, colour-code it to try and decipher it in the best possible way. Because each bird will express its emotions in a different way, just as we all have different ways of expressing our emotions. We all have different ways of expressing our emotions. For example, if I’m angry, I could get really angry, scream, smash things up, go running. I could do all sorts of things and it’s really unique to each individual. And it doesn’t reflect the intensity of the emotion I’m feeling. If I were to remain silent, I might be extremely angry and from an outside point of view, it wouldn’t show. And yet, I’m close to exploding. And that’s what’s so important to take into account. And this will also be true for our birds.
So, obviously, today I’ve only talked about bird stress. I haven’t talked about the impact of human stress on free flying, because for me that’s not what’s most important. It’s not you, as a human being, who’s going to cause problems when you go out because you’re stressed. Obviously, the aim of the game is for you to be as stressed as possible, so that you have the best reflexes, so that you too don’t get into trouble when faced with a situation, so that you know how to react at all times. But I believe that this stress will diminish as your skills increase. So for me, there’s no need to make you feel guilty or to tell you that if the outing goes badly, it’s because ‘it’s your fault, it’s because you’re too stressed and all you have to do is de-stress’ because that would be totally false, guilt-inducing and pointless. My aim is to give you the tools you need to understand what’s going on so that you can react in the right way. And that’s what we’re doing in the training, but if only for today, that’s why I’ve put the emphasis on what’s happening, how it’s happening, how to envisage the first avenues of work, because the better equipped you are, the more capable you’ll be of dealing with the situation. That’s my aim: to equip you, and the better equipped you are, the calmer you and your emotions will be, because you’ll be able to deal with the situation having worked through the problem and been as prepared as possible.
There’s so much more to say, but I really couldn’t sum it all up. I’ve already had to make a choice today, so I’ve really gone straight to the essentials. I really don’t have much time for this format, but in any case, I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I hope you’ve learnt something. I hope it’s also given you some new ways of thinking about your bird and about a possible outing, or even without necessarily talking about free flight, if only in your daily life, to learn to understand it better, it’s always useful to have this kind of skill.
In any case, don’t forget that I created the course ‘Les Fondations du vol libre’, which is the most comprehensive French-language course to date on the subject of free flight. If you want to go further and get started by mastering all these tools and all the aspects of avian behaviour, I can only recommend that you sign up before registration closes on 1ᵉʳ October.
If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, don’t hesitate to comment. In fact, in the comments section too, you’re more than welcome to suggest an upcoming topic that’s close to your heart. You can also follow me on Instagram or Facebook for more information, tips and free resources under the handle @animalethérapie. Do you have a behavioural concern with your pet or would you like ethical and professional support? You can contact me directly at contact@animaletherapie.com. And I’ll see you soon for another episode.
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