I went to get my cone chicken first this morning because I was curious that if she is going to work with me at all. And what happen! She was so different chicken than yesterday. She did not only stand - she was moving. She did not move like she did day before or yesterday morning, but she did move some and that was a good improvement from her behavior from yesterday. How relieved I was! I could get at least some foot movement to reinforce and she was trainable. Maybe she was tired yesterday.
I found partly the reason that my cone chicken was not walking yesterday. She is going through some heavy moulting. Her wings are all moulted now and starting to grow new feathers. New feathers are starting to grow right to the place we are supposed to carry the birds to the table. These new feather starters are all pointy and don't settle nicely under hands and make her skin sensitive. She has since the beginning of this course wanted to be carried differently, her legs on my arm like in a perch. Then I don't have to touch her sore wings at all and she walks so much better on the table than if I pick her up holding her wings. Funny thing is that when Jackie has restarted her to the cone walking, she has been complaining a lot to Jackie for picking her up. Now she has started to avoid Jackie. If she sometimes go to a wrong direction or goes around only one cone and sees that Jackie moves towards her to pick her up to restart from the beginning, she quickly changes direction that Jackie won't have come to pick her up.
Here you can see the moulted spot on her wing.
She has also hit her beak to the cage door and has a sore spot in her beak too. That's not dirt on her beak.
The cup chicken was slowing down a bit. I guess she had bit of a stomach problem. Every time I brought her to the table she would poop at least ones. I started to see when she had to go. She started to take few lower steps and then she would delight us with her smelling surprise. Poor Jackie had to clean the poop every time since I had to handle the chicken. Of course all this slowing for pooping and cleaning it took valuable training time. Also cup chicken would eat from the cup pecking so hard that a lot of the food would spill all over the table. The chicken would chase the spilling pellets and would then come back to go round the cups, but it totally always change the training picture and surely affected to our training. I started to feed the bird from higher and the spilling did not occur that much anymore.
I also got advise from Mr. Bailey to feed my cup and cone chickens out of the cone and cup. That way I could have the chicken placed towards the following cup or cone with my food presentation.
Anyway my chickens did not progress the way I would have liked them to progress. So many other people in the course were starting to get their chickens graduated from either one or both cup and cone tasks and I did not progress. That made me soooo depressed. I felt again to be bad trainer. Mr. Bailey did say to all of us that he don't care if we get the birds done or not. It is the behavior of trainer that he is interested. It is important that the trainer learns to change his/her behavior not what the chicken learns. I'll try to get over that I might not have enough time to train the chickens to pass the evaluation.
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