Jim Mackie - Animal Presenter

How do you train the parrots to poo on demand?!

It was something they trained themselves to do! The parrots are very intelligent; in fact they practically do the whole show on their own without any prompting. One day during the show they pooped and got a seed reward for it, so now they do it in all the shows. The same goes for the part of the show where they hang by their beak. It’s something they learned themselves and have carried on doing it ever since.

How do you train an animal?

We train animals using positive reinforcement. It’s really important to reward our animals for doing well, so when they perform something we’ve asked them to do they get a nice food reward. Ideally it’s best to start training animals from a young age, so that they get used to being handled and also get used to the large audiences and loud noises they may encounter in the shows.

What’s the best and worst animal to train?

The best ones to train are the intelligent animals like the parrots. They pick things up really quickly and often don’t need us to remind what they have to do! On of the worst one we tried to train was a porcupine. They’d be fine one day and the next they’d completely forget everything they’d been trained to do.

How did you become an animal trainer?

I started out as an explainer at the zoo and then I moved up to animal training. It’s a great job because I get to spend my days playing with my favourite animals! It’s a lot of work as well. I start each morning in husbandry, which means I have to clean out a lot of the animals. And then I spend my afternoons working with the animals and teaching our animals new behaviours. We are training a new Harris hawk at the moment so I’m doing a lot of work with him right now.