The Biggest Myth

By Ken Globus

You hear it over and over again. You read it in magazine articles and books by virtually all of the popular behaviorists. It’s repeated in Internet chat rooms, on message boards, and email rings and is echoed at bird club meetings everywhere: “Never use gloves. Birds are afraid of gloves.”

Oh, yeah, that’s right. Birds ARE afraid of gloves. But then, birds are afraid of lots of things. In fact, they’re afraid of anything new. And yet nearly all the well-known, influential bird experts staunchly forbid the use of gloves. So, what’s the result of their sage advice? When birds bite, their owners feel frightened and helpless and back off.

What’s the result? Your bird bites. Ouch. You back off. When you approach it again, it is with some hesitation. Your movements are tentative and jerky. This makes the bird more nervous, so it bites with more conviction. “After all,” he’s thinking, “if that bite got him to go away, I’ll do it again.” Now you’re even more hesitant to get close to your bird. So, you back off. The bird is rewarded with exactly what it wanted - to get you to go away. The next time, it bites harder. In other words YOU’RE TRAINING YOUR BIRD TO BITE.

I contend that the no-glove rule does more harm to people/bird relationships than any other misinformation. And it is promoted by virtually all the experts. With something as important as this, wouldn’t you think that those pushing this theory might have taken the trouble to find out if the rule actually holds up under scrutiny? Well, I did. And it doesn’t.

Want to stick a bare finger in here?

Birth of a Legend

So, where did this pervasive concept, that birds are afraid of gloves, come from? In the days when I first started working with birds they were mostly wild-caught adults. People believed that because the imported birds had been roughly handled with gloves during capture, transit and quarantine, birds built up a negative association with the bulky hand gear. It seemed to make sense, since birds recoiled at the sight of them. But birds aren’t wild-caught today and they still recoil from gloves. Even birds that are hand raised babies. Why?

Anyone who spends a lot of time around birds soon realizes that birds are afraid of ANYTHING new. You can change your hair color, put on a hat, new nail polish, introduce a new toy to its cage, and your bird might wig out. So, rather than there being a negative association with gloves, it’s the fact that gloves are something new that scares birds.

Get Over It

If using a glove is the only thing that will keep you from being hesitant or backing off, my advice is, use gloves. Birds soon become accustomed to them and in a very short time the gloves can be abandoned.

What if you were Superman? What if you were invulnerable? Impervious to pain and injury? You could tame any bird in the world. So why do people let fear of pain keep them from taming their birds? Remove fear from the equation and you’re on your way to a tame bird. Want to be less vulnerable, less frightened? Wear gloves. And hold the kryptonite, please.

When I work with a new bird, the first thing I do is test to see how committed it is to biting. Only then, if necessary, do I put on gloves for the first minutes of a session. The bird soon realizes that biting is not effective and it stops. At that time I slip off one glove and continue with one gloved hand and one bare hand. Then the second glove comes off and the bird hardly notices the difference.

Another “F” word

Another benefit of the gloves is to help lower your fear level so you can remain calm enough to keep your energy low and move your hands in a slow, smooth, fluid way. Birds don’t perceive fear as much as they perceive what makes them fearful. And it is almost totally visual. The way you move your hands makes all the difference. So, it doesn’t matter how afraid you are; I can have sweat running down my spine, but as long as I’m able to control my energy and movements and project a sense of calmness, the birds respond well.

So Much Malarkey

So, what would it take to convince you that the glove thing is a myth? Here’s what got me. Like the majority of my most important realizations about working with birds - and the glove issue is a major one - it is the birds that taught me how to work with them. And this one came about totally unexpectedly. I was working with a very aggressive bird, a passionate biter. I had to wear gloves or I would have been shredded. I had worked a few minutes on the biting behavior, getting it to stop biting, then do step ups, etc. Then I slipped off one of the gloves. What happened next really surprised me and it was as clear as a bolt from the blue. The bird recoiled at the sight of my bare hand! So, now do we have to say, “Birds are afraid of bare hands!?” Of course not. The bird had gotten used to being touched by my gloved hand, but not the bare hand. It was that something new was added to the mix. And that same thing has been repeated with many other birds; not every time, but often enough to clearly indicate that birds are afraid of change, not gloves. Once again, I want to emphasize: The glove thing is nothing but a myth!

Here’s another compelling piece of evidence: In a bird club program in Salt Lake City I worked with a wild caught adult Orange Wing Amazon. It apparently had negative experiences with gloves and was more than a little afraid of them. I didn’t need to work with gloves with the bird because it was not biting very hard, but I decided to demonstrate something for the audience to illustrate my point. When I went near the bird with gloves it squawked and recoiled. Then I handled the bird with gloves, exposing it to what it was afraid of. In a few minutes, I handled the bird with one bare hand and one gloved had and it accepted either hand equally as well. Again and again the birds teach us.

Empower Yourself

Get gloves that reduce collateral damage, but are supple; you need to feel what you’re doing. You’ll find that what gloves do for your confidence is invaluable. And having confidence is a big part of being able to lower your energy and help your bird become more comfortable with you. That’s anything but a myth.

Glove Me Do

Here’s a photo showing Arlene, a Redondo Beach workshop participant , with her African Grey. Arlene had lived with this bird for years without ever being able to touch him. After Ken got the bird accepting his touch, he blended Arlene into the process. Because she was fearful, Ken had her start with gloves. After a couple minutes she gained the confidence to remove one glove. At this point the Grey related the same to the gloved hand and the bare hand. And, for the first time, Arlene was touching her bird.

Many photos on this web site show Ken and others working in various combinations, with gloves, with one gloved hand and one bare hand or with both hands bare. When you get past the bird’s aggressive stage you can blend in the bare hand. I do this as quickly as possible.

All You Need is Glove

You can find gloves at your local hardware store. Ideally, you would want them snug fitting; the more slack, the easier it is for a bird to get a hold of soft tissue. They should be thick enough to provide protection yet supple enough for you to feel the pressures of your touch on the bird. No welder’s gloves or oven mitts. A cowhide work glove will do just fine. Lamb is better. Goat is the strongest for the thickness. Deerskin is my favorite. It’s very flexible and supple, but also a bit expensive.

When I do workshops, knowing that I may have to handle as many as twenty birds in a weekend, I usually put self-adhesive bandage (also known as vet wrap) on my index fingers. Great protection.

Also, when dealing with a bird that repeatedly takes chunks out of my forearms, like the large macaws, I wrap them in Ace bandage (the forearms, not the birds).

Ken Globus “The Bird Whisperer” Passed Away Sept. 10 2008

Sad news: Ken Globus, known to many as the Bird Whisperer for his ability to quickly calm unfriendly parrots, died Sept. 10 2008 of cancer.

Whether you admired his training methods or didn’t you have to respect him as a person and what he brought to the avian community.    We received this email from his brother and wanted to share it with our readers.

‘Dear Friends:

This will come as a surprise to many people who didn’t know he was ill, but Ken Globus passed away on September 10th.  Ken, who hadn’t been a smoker for about 25 years, was diagnosed with lung cancer that had spread to his esophagus.  What’s truly shocking is that, between his original diagnosis and his death, only 10 weeks had elapsed.

Most of you are receiving this email because you’re on his mailing list.  So most of you know him as The Bird Whisperer.

Here are some things you may not know about how Ken got started working with aggressive and phobic birds.  Our parents used to own a tropical fish store in Inglewood, California.  One day, our mother cleared out some space in the store and asked Ken what he thought would be a good idea to put there.  Ken thought about it, then suggested that they might start carrying a few birds.  Since our parents knew nothing about birds, they put Ken in charge, and he got to work reading books and researching bird behavior before he bought his first bird for the store.  Keep in mind that, in those days, almost all birds sold in stores were wild caught, not bred in captivity - so they were usually pretty terrified and unruly.  What Ken discovered - to his great surprise - was that very little of the advice in the bird books was appropriate for dealing with aggressive birds.  So, through trial and error, he learned how to work with them.

One of the many qualities that made Ken so successful with birds was his patience - he could simply persist until a bird decided that being aggressive wasn’t working to drive Ken away.  Another quality that served him so well was his flexibility - if one thing didn’t work to calm a bird, he’d try something else until he made progress.  (Parenthetically, it’s a quality that also made him a great father.)

When my parents reached an age when they were no longer able to run a demanding business, Ken went out on his own, doing private training sessions for bird owners.  It was at one of those sessions where an immensely grateful client said, “Ken, you really are a bird whisperer.”

Ken called me and mentioned the incident, and I suggested he use the name The Bird Whisperer because I thought it would quickly convey what he was capable of doing.  But he was reluctant to use the name because he thought some people might think it was a bit pretentious.   As a marketer, I reasoned that, at the very least, it was very easy for people to remember, where Ken Globus was not.  He finally agreed.

Over the years, a lot has been written and said about Ken’s techniques.  You are certainly free to dismiss what I’m about to say as the biased rantings of a grieving brother, but I was simply blown away by what Ken was able to do with birds.  I traveled with him both to private sessions and public workshops, and I watched him calm birds that couldn’t even be touched by their owners.  I saw people sobbing at the the sight of Ken stroking a bird’s neck, a bird who wouldn’t allow even its owner to come near it for over a decade.  And I saw this happen many times.

His bird-training sessions really picked up when he set up his web site.  For the first time, people outside of the Los Angeles area where he lived could get a sense of what his techniques were all about.  He began to be interviewed by news organizations, magazines and newspapers, all of them interested in how he was able to tame birds so quickly.  He was hired by zoos, bird stores, and rescue organizations to deal with birds they’d given up on.  And somewhere along the line, Ken got a phone call from a woman who identified herself as Kate Capshaw.  Thinking it was a joke perpetrated by one of his friends, Ken hung up on her.  She called back and informed him that she and her husband, Steven Spielberg, would like Ken to come to their house for a private session.  He gulped, and agreed.  And as Ken showed Kate how to handle the bird, Steven walked all around him with a video camera, recording the entire hour-long session.  Talk about pressure!

Through his many interviews and public appearances, Ken got to be pretty adept at dealing with one kind of pressure or another.  The type that gave him the biggest problem came from his detractors who often wrote vicious and totally untrue things about him, and he would sometimes forward to me the more outrageous items.  Usually we would giggle like schoolgirls, but I found some of these things to be appallingly mean-spirited, and I would want him to post an angry rebuttal.  But, for the most part, he wouldn’t.  He simply felt that these people were uninformed.  I always thought that was a most charitable way of looking at it, especially considering that many of the most shamelessly idiotic things were perpetrated by some of the more authoritative people in the bird world, people who felt more comfortable sniping at him from a distance rather than bothering to actually attend one of his events.  But I digress.

What Ken was able to do with birds wasn’t magic.  Ken was just an incredibly sensitive and intuitive person who, in a very short span of time, could figure out the best way to get a bird over its fears.  At this I’m fairly certain there were few like him.

I can also tell you that as a brother, there were none like him.  He was kind, funny, incredibly bright, supportive, generous, and courageous - qualities he displayed up to his dying breath.

Last week there was an occasion I’ll never forget.  It was only a few days after his passing, and my wife wanted to put together a “remembrance”, where a few friends could gather to talk about what Ken meant to them.  Even though this was thrown together at the last minute, over 60 of his friends showed up, and I’m certain that, given enough time, a few hundred might have been there.  Ken was loved and appreciated by so many people.  There were folks there from various stages of his life, all relating stories about Ken that helped to paint a complete picture of him.  And what a picture it was!

He was a great guy.  A talented man who could do so many things well.  And he was my best friend for 57 years.

- Dennis Globus”

Some Ken Globus Videos: