By Abi Strachan
So many people are under the impression that in order to be a good bird home you need to be home only for birds. We don’t believe this, in fact, many of us have multi-pet households. What we do believe is that these situations need to be monitored at all times, and safety is to be ensured for all animals.
We do not believe that predatory animals should have any interaction with prey animals. This means that birds and cats, dogs, ferrets, rodents, or any other predatory animal, should never interact with your bird.
Many people will argue that they’ve had successful interactions between their birds and cats or dogs, for many years, but all it takes is one time, and everything changes.
Mammal saliva is toxic to birds, this means ingestion thereof, as well as wounds inflicted by mammals, often prove fatal to beloved pet birds. This isn’t always done out of aggression, birds, and dogs cats are built very differently, they interact differently and they play differently. What your dog may see as playful behavior, could result in a scratch going unnoticed on your bird, and then the race against time begins, hoping that the expensive treatments work in time. It’s just not worth the risk.
Recently we’ve had a new member of the #oneleggedgang join our CB community, Pauli the Patagonian Conure (below). Pauli, and the rest of the family’s birds, lived happily with the dogs, often running between their legs. Until they didn’t. Pauli was safely in his outdoor aviary, climbing his way up the cage wall when a dog grabbed his leg and ripped it right off. It’s a miracle that he didn’t bleed to death. It may well have not been an act of aggression by the dog, it may have been playful, but the laws of physics and predator VS prey came into play, and Pauli will never be the same again. Thankfully Pauli survived, but not without having to adjust every aspect of his life to accommodate a disability that never should have happened.
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