In this blog post, I will share with you reasons why parrots are kept as pets, and some tips for parrots beginners owners, and more.
Why parrots are kept as pets
Parrots are often bought for the wrong reasons: "wanting to get out of the ordinary", "show off with a talking animal", "bring exoticism to your home" ... These reasons lead to adoptions based on a total ignorance of the ethogram and the needs of parrots and therefore, ultimately , a difficult cohabitation.
Read about : parrot agression
Important specificities
Unlike the dogs, cats and ferrets that inhabit our homes, the parrot is a “prey” animal which, like the horse, needs to forge a bond of trust and which finds its salvation in flight. This state of affairs leads the parrot to have reactions that humans describe as inappropriate (biting, screaming, fleeing contact, etc.). Man has tried to find displays there by cutting off its wings, raising it by hand, etc. This is easier than understanding the animal. But fortunately another approach is possible!The parrot is an animal that has a vital need for presence and social ties, because of that why parrots are kept as pets. All species of parrots are gregarious, sexual and monogamous. They need to find their lifelong partner and choose a “human-darling” when they live in the hostels. The relationship can quickly become fused with the excesses that this implies.
The parrot is an animal that lives old, sometimes even very old! We have all suffered from seeing a dog or a cat that we love grow old and leave, but now it may be our bird that will survive us. A Macaw Ararauna or Cacatoes des Molluques that can live nearly 80 years. We must therefore think even more about its adoption and also plan its future without us by its side.
Different species to choose with care
If in dogs, there are racial predispositions, this is also the case with our friends the parrots. Of course, each individual keeps his individuality according to his personality, his environment and his experience but we cannot hide these predispositions.
The cockatoo, for example, is often presented to potential buyers as a "real little dog", very endearing and very cuddly. Except that if he is very demanding of physical contacts and interactions, he is also extremely demanding and can quickly develop behavioral problems if the relationship between him and his owner is bad.
The grays of Gabon are known to be rather sluggish and poorly adapting to changes.
Puberty or behavioral sexual dimorphism also vary according to the species, even if here again, we must not exclude the parameter of individuality and fall into an immutable generality.
No parrot is like a dog, a cat, or any other pet. They are very demanding animals in terms of contact, presence, daily activities which need a specific diet, to be occupied throughout the day and a lot of sleep (minimum 10 hours in a row). It is also difficult to keep a parrot happy alone, without a congener. Behavioral or feeding problems can lead the bird to sting itself and in the most serious cases to death as it is difficult to remedy the pecking.
Besides that, the links can be very strong and a parrot at home is a special presence that fully participates in the life of the house and in the various activities. A being who laughs, sings, dances, cuddles, shows great intelligence and is very easy to learn. Like dogs, they are thirsty to learn new things and positive reinforcement works very well with them. So we can have a good time teaching him exercises and marveling at his progress.
Many parrot owners tell stories of rituals or moments of intense bonding with their animal. A bird that often becomes more of a child than a pet. Many do not hesitate to compose their schedule according to the rhythm of life of their parrot or to transform their living room into a giant aviary and amusement park for birds.
With good habituation, most also enjoy harness trips and can thus participate in walks, hikes and other walks in the great outdoors.
The constraints are however more important than when one has a domestic carnivore. Leaving on vacation is sometimes complex: finding a nanny is complicated and little appreciated by the bird. Taking it means that you will need to carry a cage and a minimum of equipment and food. It will also be necessary to ensure that the holiday home will be secure and allow the bird to stretch its wings regularly without danger for it or for the furniture and the upholstery!
If it is easy to find professionals taking care of dogs and cats (breeders, educators, behaviorists, veterinarians…), it is much more difficult to find them for our hook-billed friends.
As you can see, making the choice to adopt a parrot is fraught with consequences but so rewarding that the reflection is worth it.
Are parrots good pets for beginners
Parrots are majestic, intelligent, sensitive, dynamic and some of them can imitate speech, making them an increasingly coveted "pet".
When you go to the pet store, when you look at the advertisements of breeders or dealers, there are many opportunities to adopt a parrot, and so why parrots are kept as pets, they are so beautiful with their colorful plumage and their deep eyes, how not to give in to temptation? The seller explains to you that this parrot was raised by hand and that it will be close to you. He also tells you that its maintenance is very simple: you need a cage, seeds and a block of minerals, and why not a wooden toy to occupy it in your absence. So you go home cheerful, with the bird and the recommended accessories.
The first days in the company of the parrot go very well, he is close to you, demands your attention and explores. However, your daily life will change dramatically and quickly. He doesn't want to stay inside those bars that have been constraining him for too long, so he spends a lot of time exploring outside of his cage and destroying your gear, he gets dirty when he eats or when he defecates, he is starts to bite you when you want to pick it up or put it in its cage and it starts screaming as soon as you leave. You notice, in total helplessness, this unpleasant evolution of your parrot's behavior, without understanding why. Your parrot behaves this way because it is not a pet even if, for several decades.
The pet is a domestic animal developed and maintained by humans to meet their needs, in order to keep them company. In order for an animal to be domesticated, it must have been the subject of a continuous and constant selection, have been raised from generation to generation by man, to constitute a species or a race different from the original wild form of which it is from.
After being imported from their countries of origin to adorn our aviaries, victims of poaching, some breeders decided to breed parrots in captivity. However, despite their captivity, parrots are not for all that domesticated animals, they remain fundamentally wild. The behavior of the parrot is the result of natural selection which makes it a suitable bird for free life in nature. All the instincts and attitudes that help him survive in the wild are intact such as, for example, his distrust of intruders or predators of which humans are a part: he is not a domestic animal and he cannot be considered as such, unlike dogs and cats, which are the subject of selective breeding aimed at making them domestic animals.
Thus, captive birds have the same behaviors as birds in the wild, these are intrinsic and normal behaviors: they live in groups, they wake up and cry at sunrise, they go in search of food, they chew on natural materials, they dirty, they groom themselves, they play, they have socio-emotional interactions between fellow creatures and they take a nap. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, they repeat this routine, until sunset when they look for a safe place to perch in groups and fall asleep. Your parrot will perform all of these behaviors and try to reproduce them, sometimes adapt them, to the constraints of life in captivity.
Reasons why parrots are good pets
To meet the demand for parrots that are close to humans, breeders have developed the practice of hand-breeding chicks. It is a method that has been refined over the years, in order to imbue parrots with the human species by facilitating their socialization in order that they are dependent on them while identifying with them. This practice betrays the current difficulty for owners to understand parrots as wild and instinctual animals. As the chicks need appropriate auditory, visual and tactile stimulation for their social, emotional and sexual development, only parent-rearing can provide these stimulation and learning for the development and future well-being of these birds. The technique of Hand-rearing alters your bird's acclimatization to environmental and social variations. The hand-raised bird, which has been isolated from its congeners, has poor socialization which makes its tolerance threshold and resistance to frustration very low. Thus, it will be less adaptive and prone to change as well as the constraints associated with captivity. This is how behavioral disorders such as pecking, hyper-dependency, hyper-anxiety, hyper-aggression, hyper-vocalization, neophobia and stereotypies will develop. has poor socialization which makes his tolerance threshold and resistance to frustration very low. Thus, it will be less adaptive and prone to change as well as the constraints associated with captivity. This is how behavioral disorders such as pecking, hyper-dependency, hyper-anxiety, hyper-aggression, hyper-vocalization, neophobia and stereotypies will develop. has poor socialization which makes his tolerance threshold and resistance to frustration very low. Thus, it will be less adaptive and prone to change as well as the constraints associated with captivity. This is how behavioral disorders such as pecking, hyper-dependency, hyper-anxiety, hyper-aggression, hyper-vocalization, neophobia and stereotypies will develop.
In addition, your hand-raised parrot, if it is the only bird in the household, will constantly demand your attention because it needs it, as a gregarious bird, which lives and evolves with fellow creatures. Failing to identify with and live with birds, you will have to play this role, hand-breeding having given you the role of congener. He will want to come out of his cage to meet his exploratory need and will appreciate destroying materials such as wood, soft plastic or natural materials and he will defecate without any consideration of your furniture. He will not necessarily want to be disturbed and manipulated when you are willing, or require it of him; and if you insist, it will bite you. He'll scream more and more if you leave him alone for hours.
Most of us, when we adopt our first parrot, we do so with very human expectations, for example, we would like him to talk, or we want a bird that will be close to us, that will be cuddly. , interested and who will love us, thus fulfilling our emotional need for attention to give and receive. Therefore, we attribute to parrots human behaviors or feelings as well as expectations that are our own when we interpret them in light of our humanity and not of our knowledge of this wild species. This anthropomorphism is deleterious for the well-being of the parrot because its needs and its mode of communication are different from our needs and our expectations.
The parrot utters shrill and powerful cries, destroys your furniture, eats away the plaster of the walls, hangs itself on the lights, spreads its food everywhere, its feathers and its droppings are found in every corner: it is the daily life of parrots and that becomes yours. These behaviors are not always tolerable for us, but they are perfectly normal for a parrot, in the wild or in captivity.
Our houses and apartments, our budget as well as our availability very rarely allow us to provide a suitable environment for the development of our parrots. With the sometimes destructive activities of parrots, it is also essential that they can fly freely, not be locked in a cage, that they can explore, play, chew and more generally that they can exist without hindrance and above all, in company. of congeners. Finally, it is essential to give them access to a complete and varied diet, as well as to a constant enrichment of the living environment.
But in reality, many parrots in captivity cannot benefit from such an environment, due to our inability to meet their needs but above all, due to our ignorance of their real needs. This reality, which we see most often once the parrots are installed, leads to a significant number of resale of birds to individuals or abandonment to associations.
For all these reasons, the non-domestic species that are parrots make bad pets in the sense that we understand it, if we fully respect their nature. This is why acquiring a bird and what it entails needs to be carefully considered. If you still want to adopt a parrot, it must be able to evolve with its congeners freely, in a suitable environment, and be able to trust the humans in its home. This is done by counting many years of good care, attention and respect as close as possible to the deep nature of our parrots.
More than two thousand years ago, the first Europeans who went to Africa to discover it came back with some strange animals that live in that continent, they used to carry with them especially parrots because of their bright colors and their ability to speak, and with the known expansion of the world, people began to come to parrots of different types such as parrots The emaciated parrots from India, the macaw from South America, the ketuh or the custom-made prostitution and the spotted prostitution from Australia, and the first parrots that were carried to Europe were the African gray parrots and they are not elegant like some other parrots, but they are good at pronunciation, that is, they can imitate all kinds of sounds and remember them Even words and sentences, too.
Parrot bird behavior
Parrots spend most of their lives in the trees, and they have legs and beaks for climbing, and for landing on the branches, and they have two fingers extending forward, and two other fingers extending backward, which enable them to cling to firmly and to pick up things with their rings, so that some pet parrots, for example, can She drinks with a spoon holding her to her fingers, and the parrot's beak is short, thick and steeply bent, and she uses it for climbing and attaching to a tree branch or cage bar, and often the parrot grabs the estate with its two legs and slams the nucleus with its beak, and some parrot parrots in South America have beaks of strength that can not break the estate A person can break them except with a large hammer, and they also use their beaks to open hollows in tree trunks to establish nests for them.Most of the parrots are green in color, and thus they are well-concealed in the forests in which they live, but some of them are bright, multi-colored feathers, and the large crimson reinforcement in South America is a meter long from its large beak to the tip of its tail, and it has red feathers, although it also has On its wings are golden blue feathers, and some blue feathers in its scarlet tail.
Quito parrots or those with nests, most of which come from Australia, are white in color mostly with bright snaps on their heads, so that the large swarm of them, if they land to eat in a grain field, looks like a carpet of snow, and the most beautiful of them at all are those with the largest conventions in southern Australia, and they have It is white marked pink on the sides of her face, chest and under her wings, and she has bright red and yellow striped tops. The large black ketchup has black slate, two pale red cheeks and a top of long black feathers, and she uses her strong beak to break the hard walnut that is her favorite food.
Places of the parrot bird
Spotted parrots live in large flocks in Australia, and we can often see these parrots landing on the gum trees in search of food, about 17 cm long, and mainly green in color and have a very long blue tail, and I have raised them with multi-colored parrots, which are birds A very loving pet, because it is playful, easy to domesticate, learns to pronounce, and there are a total of 59 species of parrots in Australia, and it may be said that Australia is a country of parrots without any other country, including South America.Breeding when a parrot bird
Parrots lay a round white egg on their species, the small ones may lay nine or ten eggs per year, but the older ones usually lay only one egg, and parrots do not make nests, but they lay their eggs in tree hollows, provided that there are species that nest in the cracks of rocks or in Groves in the ground, and their chicks when their fluff grows, they look like an owl's chicks, and the predominant majority of parrots eat nuts, seeds and fruits, and large groups often gather and make noise as they eat in gardens, fields and sunny orchards.In New Guinea, small, dwarf parrots ranging in length from 7 to 12 centimeters only eat the insects that they pick up from the cracks in the tree bark. As for the large kai parrots in New Zealand, the sheep were killed to eat the fat around the kidneys, after they were only eating fruits, insects and worms. , And thus became a serious threat to farmers in New Zealand.
One of the very strange parrots is the small green hanging parrots of the parrots of the parrots in India and southeastern Asia, which sleep like a bat with its paws and its head down.
Physical description
The parrot is the best known of the birds in the world. Depending on the species, its size varies between 18 and 90 cm and its weight between 85 g and 4 kg.His place of life
Parrots are found on all five continents, mainly in forests but also in the savannah. For centuries, they have been used as pets and are very often found in cages or on a perch.His diet
The diet of parrots varies depending on the species. Depending on the case, they feed either on fruits, seeds, nuts and buds, or on flower nectar, or on herbs.Its reproduction
In nests perched on trees, cliffs or on the ground, females lay 2 to 5 eggs which they incubate alone or alternately with the male. After 17 to 30 days, the eggs hatch and the female stays in the nest for a week or two until the first feathers appear to allow the chicks not to suffer from the cold. A few weeks later, these will take off.His life expectancy
The parrot can live up to 60 years, even 100 years for the more robust.The parrot's cry
Parrots make several sounds called vocalizations to express their emotions or to demand attention.
Particular signs
Parrots have become famous for their more or less developed ability to imitate sounds and more particularly the human voice. If they are well trained, they can thus have a vocabulary of several hundred words. Some parrots are even able to understand the words they say and arrange them intelligently, recognize shapes and colors, etc.Summary
Now you know why parrots are kept as pets, and some tips that help you to be professionnel parrot owner as soon as possible.
