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Thread: Announcement concerning irresponsible pet bird forum sites

 
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    Exclamation Announcement concerning irresponsible pet bird forum sites

    We believe that some pet bird forum sites willfully shirk their responsibilities to promote safety for pet birds. Specifically, they do this not only by allowing their regular members to endorse potentially fatal physical interactions between pet birds and pet carnivorous animals (such as dogs and cats), but also by allowing their forum staff members to personally promote such potentially fatal contact between animals.

    There can be no valid excuse for willfully allowing posts or descriptions on a pet bird discussion board to stand which may encourage others to place the lives of their pet birds at serious risk. A mere thought in one's mind inspired by reading such posts or descriptions, such as "that's so cute... I should try it with my own pets and capture some video!" can easily become the seed that ends up killing a beloved companion bird. Such attacks can occur with lightning speed, allowing little or no chance for intervention, even when a guardian human is mere inches from the animals. And a dog or cat attack upon a pet bird may even occur after years with no red flag behaviors noted.

    PreciselyParrots.com will never knowingly take part in the promulgation of such terribly dangerous ideas! Our staff members will remove posts or other materials from our website that appear to endorse unsafe animal interactions. If not noticed immediately, such materials will be detected and eliminated within a reasonable interval.

    We are not opposed to companion bird owners keeping dogs or cats as pets. We merely believe that for safety reasons it is crucially important that pet birds are never allowed to enter the physical space of dogs or cats, especially when those dogs or cats are large enough to overpower them.





    Case In Point examples from our members:

    Quote Originally Posted by Wulfgeist View Post
    I lost Jasper on Tuesday and I am having a really hard time coping. There have been a few minor changes in my life recently including a move to a new place. I haven't let him out much just because everything is new and I've been busy moving things in mostly on my own as time allows. I was off work on Monday and in the late afternoon decided "hey bud, you want to come out for a while?".

    I put a paper down in front of his cage and opened the door, went about my business. He climbed around for little bit and then something spooked him, he tried to follow me..not sure. He still hasn't gotten full wings yet and hit the floor.

    What I am still trying to figure out even now is how I could have forgotten the cat..

    Not long after I moved I took in another cat. He's just a slip of a cat but former stray intact male. Where I am currently living is only one room, a finished basement so there's no where to keep the cat apart from my others. When I can't supervise him he has to stay in a large kennel because his current cat skills are in direct opposition to living in a multi-cat household.

    I am not sure how I could have forgotten the cat. I had let him out and he was happily basking in a deep cushioned window sill in the sun with birds and squirrels right outside the window. He's a former stray, I know nothing about this cat aside from to assume he's a danger to the birds.

    I'm not sure where my mind was when I let Jasper out of his cage.

    After I plucked Crowley off of him and tossed him back in his cage I checked Jasper over but from what I could feel, I didn't feel any wounds. Then I saw a drip of blood..I had a hell of time trying to figure out where it came from..then there was another..I got him toweled and checked under his wings..found the blood..it looked like it was coming from a broken feather or two..no corn starch..run up to the store for some, come back and towel him again stop the bleeding and start calling vets. My vet doesn't do birds, try the emergency one..they don't do birds..by now it's 6 and everyone is closing. Nothing else I can really do now but see how he is in the morning, he really needs antibiotics just in case..

    Tuesday morning I get up for work and he's not himself. I call in and start looking again, find a vet that does birds, office opens at 7. Call and get him right in.

    This is the part that upsets me and maybe some of you more experienced folks can tell me if this is normal or not. In order to examine him the vet requests to take him back to another room "where they usually look at birds". I just wanted him better so I said ok and that he isn't fond of toweling but when I had him toweled earlier I covered his face and he was calm. For at *least* 5 minutes maybe closer to 10 Jasper was screaming and squawking the whole time.

    They bring him back, vet tells me he actually has a puncture wound on his wing there (I told him about my examination and using corn starch to stop the bleeding the night before) and that he put some surgical glue on it. He gave me some pain killers for him and some antibiotics to put in water. That was it, good bye, let us know how he does.

    Get him home give him a dose of the pain meds. I just put it in his beak and let him do the swallowing. I mix up some dosed water and do the same with a little of it. I put him back in his cage and I'd say an hour or less later he was falling off his perch and was held up by his outstreched wings. I get him down from there and put a towel in the bottom of the cage, get him nested in it with food and water at hand but I'm watching him and he's just not looking right. He acts drunk and disoriented and before I can call the vet back he starts having seizures. He has a few close together and then he's gone. I would not have made it back to the vet in time if there was anything they could have done.

    I didn't bother with a necropsy. My guess would be he lost too much blood. I know birds can't lose much and at the time I only saw a couple drips. After the fact I started noticing there was probably more than I thought. Maybe there was nothing to be done for that, maybe I should have expressed more concern to the vet for it. I wish to hell I had not let them take him away from me, maybe I could have done something to keep him a little more calm. I can't help but think that stress didn't help the situation any either. Knowing the true cause of death will do nothing to bring him back.

    I'm just beyond upset at myself for spacing the cat. I can't be mad really at the cat, he probably just thought the bird gods answered his prayers.

    No more hearing "Want veg-ables" in the morning or being burped at (thanks Aunt Linda) every time I'm on the phone. No more squawking like a chicken or cooing like a pigeon. No more having to constantly answer "What color?" (I think he was teaching *me*).

    His urn should be here on Saturday and I'm still shopping around for someplace to have him cremated. Or maybe I am putting it off because I can't believe he's no longer in my life. A couple times now I've taken his bundle out of the freezer to look at a moment, I can't believe he is gone.

    Please no flaming about the dangers of cats and birds. I have always been careful with my cats, I know the dangers. I just don't know what the hell happened to me this time to not even give it a thought.

    I miss you, Jas, my life will no longer be the same, but it is already different having known you. Thank you for the sunshine and the laughs when I needed them most.
    Quote Originally Posted by EVanskiver View Post
    Please note this story is a month old but I felt that perhaps you all would be interested in hearing it. Update at the bottom

    I love animals. All animals. I do not even like putting down ant killer in my yard because I hate the idea of killing all the ants. So, when a cat decided to walk in my front door and act as if she lived there, my SO and I welcomed her with open arms.

    The cat was the greatest cat you could ask for. She would sit in our laps while we watched TV and head butt us for attention whenever possible. She even became best friends with our dogs we ended up getting about a year after she moved in.

    There was one small problem however. She had been living outside for awhile and had lived off what she could catch. So we kept the cat out of the room with our hamster and things did well until the day she slipped in without us seeing. The cage crashed to the floor and broke apart and we ended up burying our hamster in the middle of moving to another house.

    I was angry, and upset that it happened but not so upset at the cat as myself. The cat was being a cat and had absolutely no idea why no one wanted to pay her any attention for a few days. Eventually we forgave her for what happened and moved on.

    At that time we had Tyrael, our Alexandrine, and the cat was again always kept separate, but was never that interested in the big ol bird anyways.

    Things went smoothly from that point on until one day we were asked to take in a small green parrolet. This was one of the cutest birds I had seen and its attempts at biting were comical. My SO finally found a bird she could be comfortable with.

    Now the cage that Pistol (The parrolet) came with was a cheap plastic bottomed wire cage that barely held together. We decided to keep Pistol on my computer desk where I spent most of my time and away from the cats.

    Fast forward a couple months and I get a phone call from my SO which I am barely able to understand, but what I did get was that Pistol was dying in her hands. I was home within 20 minutes and was there with my SO as Pistol passed away. We buried him that night next to our hamster.

    What was the cause of Pistol dying? Procrastination. I swore when I got Pistol I would replace the cage with something more sturdy and had failed to make that happen. Whether I was short on money or time seems so small to the cost Pistol and we paid for that delay. The cat that killed our hamster managed to get into the room with Pistol and jumped on the side of the cage which then collapsed and fell off the desk. Moments after, my SO found Pistol in the living room bleeding and well, the rest you already know.

    I went back to work because I had to and swore up and down, that cat was going to live outside. When I got home, she tried to snuggle up to me and I pushed her away. Meanwhile my SO and her Mom both argued that we should let her stay and that our birds were all big enough that she could not hurt them. Against my better judgement, I caved, and we kept her inside.

    Fast forward about a year and while in a pet store, my SO touches the glass where this clumsy cockatiel is tapping and we both fall head over heels for this little baby bird.

    My SO finds the sturdiest cage she can, pays a ton at the register and we come home feeling confident that this time, everything will be ok. The cage is self standing with proper sized bars that I couldn't even get my pinky through very well. It was heavy and certainly could not be pulled over.

    We named the cockatiel Freddie Mercury. Because, well, why not? She lived in the room with me and the rest of the birds for a long while. We then moved her to our bed room and eventually to the dining room as we had not had any issues with the cats and the cage was certainly cat proof. This went fine for a long while. Until this weekend that is.

    I wear contacts and actually took them out for the first time in months on Saturday morning. The day was spent as any other, playing computer, chatting with the birds, and enjoying the weekend. Around 7pm or so, I hear a racket behind me from Freddie and turn to see a very blurry picture of the cat crouched between the cages. As all I can see is blurry colors I can see that Freddie is in the middle of her cage yelling at the cat. I immediately shoo the cat away and seeing Freddie on her perch, assume all is well and go back to what I was doing.

    Sunday morning, my SO goes to see Freddie and says she thinks there is blood on the cage. I think, surely not?! Must be berries. I put in my contacts and see it was even worse then she had known. Blood on the wall, on the cage, food bowl, perches and on Freddie. Her tail was gone, and blood colored her wings a dark red on the tips.

    We immediately take her to our bedroom and put the cat up. I give her a bath to clean the wounds so I can see better and I let her hang out with my SO as I go investigate.

    9 feathers littered the floor where her cage was. 9! Blood splattered the walls and I feel like the biggest failure ever. My kid just got hurt and nearly died due to a threat I knew I should have handled twice before.

    Freddie spent the day with me. She did not sing "If your happy and you know it" and was very quiet throughout the day. She did however get upset that I wasn't sharing my chips with her even though she had been given a large pile of treats due to guilt.

    This morning, Freddie was sitting on her perch while I got ready for work. Hopefully, I will come home to see her and get to bring her out.
    Our animals have no choice but to trust in our judgement. They do not get to argue a decision or point out reasons why we should not make a certain choice. In truth, they don't even know it is us who caused them to be hurt.

    What hurts most is that Freddie wants to be with me, and I am the bad guy. She has no idea that I am the reason she is in pain. I am the reason she no longer sings "If your happy and you know it". And all I can do is take the second chance I got but did not deserve and try to get her to sing again.
    Please learn from my terrible costly mistakes. I loved the cat. She was as cuddly as could be and thought she was a dog. But as a father of a small feathered child, I should have made the hard choice long ago. Do not let compassion put your animals in harms way. This is the mistake I made, my love for my cat caused pain for someone who trusted in me wholeheartedly.

    Currently, the cat has a new home at a family members house where we can visit and Freddie remains in our room being watched like a hawk.

    Learn from me...please.

    UPDATE! Freddy is growing in her tail feathers and is singing again


  2. The following 8 users like this post:

    Blancaej (01-05-2014), Debra (01-05-2014), HisAngel (01-05-2014), Honesty (01-05-2014), jules (02-22-2014), plax (01-05-2014), spiritbird (01-05-2014), Turquoise (01-07-2014)

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