Gaufridus_David

Their short-term memory runs no longer than 10 seconds, making them impossible to train.

You might be pleasantly surprised!

Here are ostrich training videos from the Cincinnati Zoo and the North Carolina Zoo.

This article describes ostrich training at the Denver Zoo:

An ostrich has 4-inch claws on each foot, so its feet are very dangerous. To prevent injury to keepers at the zoo, the birds are taught to sit, which immobilizes their claws. The most effective way to teach them to sit on cue is through operant conditioning. “Using a whistle as an event marker, the ostrich’s movements are shaped” until it is in a sitting position – in other words, each time the bird approaches or approximates sitting, the behavior is marked with the whistle and the ostrich is rewarded, until eventually, the bird sits.

And this page by the late Sophia Yin mentions training ostriches:

Sacramento Zoo Ostrich and Giraffe Training: Trained the ostriches and giraffes to target using positive reinforcement (2000)

(Targeting: definition, how-to)

Well, the Cincinnati video says (2:18) "it took about six months to get to the point where she was really comfortable working with Dan and even hand-feeding from Dan."

Would well-behaved ostriches be worth the time investment? How long do you keep an individual ostrich before slaughter anyway?

I'm not any of the OPs, but you may be interested in the discussion under this blog post by Claire Bowern, who does fieldwork on endangered languages.

Excerpt from the first comment:

For myself, my interest in constructed languages lead me towards a greater concern for language endangerment: As a young conlanger I started searching the Web to learn more about linguistics and found your blog along the way; pretty much as a direct result of that I am now studying towards being a field-worker.

Linguists tend to think he is

Hm, there are 'factions' within linguistics that think he's right and factions that think he's wrong, and which faction is dominant varies geographically and between departments.

Even that post (which I think is too optimistic) acknowledges that language acquisition is harder for adults:

It may be harder for us [i.e., adults] to get to where we could pass for a native, but that’s probably pretty obvious and not why most of us start learning a language, right?