# Cockatiel Refuses to be Trained!



## crazybirdmom (Jul 27, 2019)

Hello people, finally I made an account after lurking this forum for months. I'm gonna jump right in. 

My 11-month-old male cockatiel, Poco, is probably the most stubborn bird ever! Gah! He's cuddly (and frequently nippy), he responds to step up/down or "Poco come here/jump" alright. But when it comes to training he'll pretend not to hear me! This started about 3 monts ago. Before that, he was pretty compliant. Which abled him to learn come here, jump, and fly. But after I went overseas for 2 weeks, he doesn't want to fly to me anymore! He's not a good flyer that's why I try to train him everyday, and now he only fly to get to his favorite spot, which is on the sofa in front of a big mirror.

I usually train him on his cage. And this is how our (mostly failed) training session looks likes. I started off with "Poco jump!" in a short distance. Although he responded quite slowly because I think he was scared, he jumped. And then "Poco back to the cage!", no problem with that. For the second time I told him to jump with a longer distance albeit still less than 1 meter. AND HE IGNORED ME. Okay not really, he'd walk to the front and stared at everything and went to the back of the cage, chewing my destroyed plastic plant or just walking around doing anything BUT TRAINING. By now I'd use my kind-of-evil-tactic, I'd pretend to walk away (sometimes saying bye) which made him went running to the front; I went back at him and tried to "Poco jump/fly"-him again. Back then he'd fall for it, but now I think he knew when I said bye I'm not going to actually leave him alone, so he'll go back to the back of the cage again with a smug face saying "Hah! You'll never train me hooman!," again, chewing my destroyed plastic plant.

I've tried using various kind of snacks, even the unhealthy ones that he'd try his hardest to snatch from me, like potato chips (I know I know so unhealthy, I'm just desperate ). But he (tried to) ignored them every time we went into training session. Particularly flight training. He only flies if he wanted it, like getting to someone's shoulder, flying back to her cage to eat, flying to her favorite spot, or for emergency. He's such a spoiled brat haha. 

I love him A LOT. And I'm not ashamed to share it with the whole world, hence the username, a label my friends put on me, I'm honored 🙂. But I just want him to fly! He loves to sky-gaze and tweet to other birbs. I want him to be able to free fly in the vast sky one day. I want him to do things that birbs naturally do ("Be a birb Poco!".... not funny....). I want him to exercise. I WANT HIM TO FLY. But he's so stubborn that he reminds me of my little cousin who disobey orders for the sake of it. I hope you can give me tips and tricks or something. Thank you so much! 😀🐥

This is the spoiled birb, Poco


----------

