Quote Originally Posted by jal4470 View Post
If you are flying a redtail and this happens, in my experience it is because you over trained the bird. If you are spending a good deal of time training and keep the bird sharp you can be in for a world of hurt. If you keep the training limited to, don't fear me, come when I call, pay attention to me in the field you shouldn't have this problem. I have fed a number of redtails by hand, from head level and never had one grab at me. But I don't keep my birds hot and I don't train more than I have to to get by. If you do keep your bird hot and over train it, you won't be able to avoid it figuring out where the food is coming from.
Yeah, I'm reasonably confident my last bird was over trained which didn't help much of anything. She was never aggressive to my free hand though. More so the face. Personally I'd rather be grabbed in the hand than the face any day. However, we did work through it and she eventually stopped that. However, I never let her see food in my free hand either, which is probably why she never went for it. It was suggested to me that I look into a strobe light for hood training and then I got side tract by this thread since this form of training is more familiar to me and there have been a few times I would have liked to use it as a fall back for daily handling like jess swap, breast/fatness assessment etc, but didn't know how to handle food with a raptor without accidentally training food related aggression that I'd likely regret later.