I am a new parrot owner - I had 2 parakeets and a conure of some kind when I was a kid, but I didn't know how to train or tame them so 2 of them (who were biters) just stayed in their cages. I never developed the kind of relationship with them that I have with Coco now.
When I started studying up for parrot ownership, I started with the books at the library - and returned them the next day. "Some parrots pluck their own feathers and know one knows why." Hmm, sounds like an out of date book to me, more recent books explain several reasons for feather plucking. My first decision was, just like with dog training, "throw out all books written before 2003 (except Don't Shoot the Dog)."
A lot of 'traditional' training philosophy is still stuck in the parrot owners community and it is hard to overcome - one of the most prevalent appears to be the notion of birds as "pack heirarchy" animals like dogs. You read things about "height dominance" and making "sure that the bird is higher in the pack than the dog" and so on.
According to wild animal trainers though, this is not how parrots behave - "height dominance" doesn't exist in wild parrots so why would it exist in tame parrots? Your parrot isn't a dog and we won't be as successful as possible if we think parrots and dogs are the same. Many principles of training appear to carry over - but not all. I am so thankful for the Clicker Training for Birds by Melinda Johnson - I use it as a check point against my Parrot Behavior text book: and when there is a conflict, I stick with what the clicker pro says.
