Dog meets Bird

[pawprints1985]

When my husband and I rescued our dog she was afraid of every little sound now not so much until we brought her over to my in-laws for a visit and she herd the blue and gold yell for the first time she ran in to one of the bedrooms and didn't come out until we left no mater what we tried. This bird is going to be living with us someday and I want to know how to help Jetta before he comes.

[Nettle]

Does the bird speak or just shriek?

[pawprints1985]

he talks but when anyone approaches the house of first comes in he shreak she is fine with our gray, but she isn't as loud as the big guy.

[emmabeth]

Can you get a recording of the birds noises, then you can desensitize her to those sounds at home perhaps, by playing it at a really low volume whilst you feed her really high value rewards and gradually increasing the volume/length of sessions until shes happy about it?

[Nettle]

Emms has given you the best advice, and I am going to add a very serious word of warning.

When there are talking birds in the house with a dog or dogs, the bird will mimic human speech to the dog - calling it, giving it commands and so on.

This will utterly confuse the dog and in many cases will ruin recall training, and quite possibly any other training too.

So - when training your dog to recall, never use those words where the talking bird can hear and mimic. It's a tough call but it can be done and it should be done. I would advise other training to be done with hand signals not words, and never ever teach the bird to whistle. Brief visitors likewise.

This is especially important with rescue dogs that are already nervous/fearful.