Imprinting Prairies

[Tom Smith]

Thanks for that Tom, so what would you do differently do you think to prevent the aggresiveness towards strangers, dogs and children? Would you encourage them seeing many during the imprinting stages?

Perhaps I would be a little less of "the person" with my bird and let any body and every body relate to her as she grew up, like giving her rides in the vehicle where she could see out and maybe spending some time in a local park watching soccer games with people of all stage and ages. I have noticed that eyases taken from an eyrie where they can see cattle don't show any reaction to cattle later on but ones taken from eyries where there are no cattle spend some troubling moments getting used to them later. So with a pure imprint I would think that exposing them to everything that they may encounter later would be a good idea. There was a thing with my dog and this bird, she was kind of agressive with the dog she had been raised with, maybe a sibling type of realtionship and interaction. I can't be sure, I pretty much thought that given a choice there would be no reason to work with a prairie taken so young. I have worked with prairies, wild taken eyases that were taken beyond 35 days of age that offered no unusual difficulties. They would be my choice now or an older passage.
Also since this was the only prairie I have raised and trained from that young of an age It could be I wasn't really prepared to think of everything I should be doing and also maybe she wasn't typical of birds so raised, but I thought I would offer my comments anyway.