Other People Posing Risks to Your Birds

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Even if you are very careful with your own birds and make all necessary precautions to keep smoke, teflon, chocolate, avacado, and other deadly substances away from your bird, it’s a whole other story if you have unfamiliar people involved.

In my household everything is basically bird proof and I begin to take it for granted. I don’t have any teflon pans, no avacados, chocloate is put away, no ceiling fans, no toxis plants, controlled drafts, bathroom doors always closed, two doors to go outside of the house, no other pets, etc. I have all the necessary precautions for living with a flighted bird safely.

I started to realize the important of remembering what kinds of precautions are necessary again when I started taking my birds to other people’s houses for visits. What really got me thinking about it was when I saw other people using teflon pans. Because I got rid of all of mine, I no longer even think if pans are safe or not for birds. But in other people’s houses I have to make better precautions with my birds like leaving them outside while folks are cooking and watching that the pans are not overheated.

Here are some other concerns to keep in mind if you take your bird to other people’s houses or have other people visit you. For some reason or another it seems like people are obsessed with sneaking food to your pet. They think they are doing it a favor. Yet they don’t know what they are giving it and what kind of diet the bird is on etc. They may have seen you feed food from the table to the bird and try to do that too. Who knows when someone may decide to sneak a chocolate chip cookie over to your bird thinking that polly must love cookies. Or they could just be interrupting your training diet or food regime.

Some people like to try to pet your bird through the bars or when it is out not realizing it will bite them. Some people might decide your bird is lonely in its carrier and let it out only to have it fly all over the place or cause trouble. Other times you might just run into issues like the other person’s house having mirrors that confuse the bird, ceiling fans, or other things that it may not be used to in a “bird safe” environment. The whole point of taking it to the stranger’s house is to socialize it and desensitize it to things like this but it is important to do so slowly and in a controlled manner.

It is not always possible or practical to try to educate everyone that is near your bird so it’s just more important to keep the bird near you at all times. Unlike in your own household you cannot change the environment or lifestyle to suit your birds so it is important to be aware of the dangers and keeping your birds away from them.

If you’re visiting a household with a lot of people or people who are too nosy, you might want to go to the further precaution of putting a lock on the carrier, and putting some signs on your carrier like “Do not feed” and “Don’t stick fingers inside of cage, bird bites.” I just know from some of my outings with my birds that if they weren’t under my immediate attention all the time, the people I was visiting might have messed around them the wrong way too much.

Warning: You should always take your bird outside on a harness or tether unless it has been properly trained for outside un-tethered interaction by a professional.