Hi guys! Welcome back to Animal Wonders!

This is Zoe. She's an Amazon parrot. This might be a little bit difficult of an episode because Zoe is quite loud. 

Alright, right now what I'm doing is helping her get some of her energy out in a productive way, and this is plenty good, isn't it? It's good to flap your wings and stretch, huh?

The reason I'm trying to get some of her energy out is because Zoe and I are going through... umm... a difficult patch in our relationship. Alright, she's a little loud, so I'm going to go ahead and put her in the other room so that I can tell you the backstory.

(=0.42) We rescued Zoe when she was quite young, so we've been through a lot together. Several years ago, Zoe started becoming nervous around objects around her, so I wanted to help her work through that fear by giving her a tool so she could be confident around them.

The tool I gave her was to teach her to target, meaning she would take her beak and touch it to the object, and in return, she'd get a treat. She learned this really quickly and it slowly progressed to a very enthusiastic- instead of just touching her beak, she would open her mouth, and just put her mouth on it.

(=1:09) About a year ago, it got really enthusiastic, so instead of just opening her mouth and placing it on it, she quickly grabbed onto it. Recently, this quick grab has turned into a lunge and a bite, and now this biting of the object has been redirected to me.

This is called displaced aggression, where her fear of an object has turned to aggression and then has been displaced onto another object. So what do you do when you start having issues like this? Well, you figure out ways to work through it.

(=1:32) I've been working really hard to watch her behaviour closely so that I can observe when her behaviour changes to become aggressive. My goal right now is to try and reduce the amount of times that she practices that aggressive behaviour. So I want to give her treats, but I'm not going to offer my... I'm not gonna... I'm not gonna... I'm not gonna... I'm not going to offer her my fingers directly.

So we have this neat little trick that we do so that I can continue to work with her and interact. You ready, Zoe? Yeah? Okay, here we go. One, two, three, BANG! 

See how I can offer a flat hand to her, so I'm not sticking my fingers in her face for her to latch on to? This works really well, and I'll just keep- keep doing this until we work through this issue.

(=2:22) So we're all going to have times in our life when we have a situation that's difficult with others- maybe another person, or animals- where we have to figure out a way to work through it. My advice is that you find ways to continue to engage so that you can work on building a better relationship.

If you want to stay updated on mine and Zoe's relationship, and go on an adventure with us every week, subscribe to our YouTube channel, AnimalWondersMontana. If you have any questions for me, leave them in the comments below, and we'll see you next week!