My former boss had two African Grey parrots perched besides his desk and kept them there for a year until the whole office revolted.
The fucking birds behaved ok when he was around, but the minute he left they started fighting each other or screaming like crazy.
Trying to fix a broken webserver that needs to be working RIGHT NOW while two parrots shout their lungs out next door is an interesting experience. We had to convince him to simulate he was leaving and hide because he wouldn’t believe it.
And the whole space around his desk smelled like bird shit. Every nook and cranny was stuffed with it, there was bird shit even inside the goddam disk drives or between the mouse buttons.
There was a guy who was ice fishing by tying the fishing line to a stick across the hole and then leaving it there, coming back hours later to check. He couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t catching anything, and the bait was gone on all his lines. So he set up a camcorder to monitor one of his lines.
A while after he left, a raven would fly down, pull up the line, take the fish off the hook, and put the hook back in the water. That’s my definition of smart.
That sounds like somebody is WAAAAAAY overestimating the dog. A 4yo is a pretty smart cookie.
H.
Birds are very, very smart. Some can even grasp the concept of tool use, as you can see in the video here. If you’re too lazy, it shows an untrained crow trying get a treat out of a tubular jar. It can’t reach it with its beak, but finds a piece of wire nearby that it bends into a hook, which it then uses to fish out the treat.
As for owning a parrot: Don’t do it. It’s a lifetime commitment with serious lifestyle repercussions. You will have to spend more time at home, and you probably won’t, and the bird will take it out on you.
Isn’t that true of any warm blooded pet?
I’ve thought about getting a ball python. But I couldn’t do the mice thing.
Well, some dogs/cats are a 20 - 25 year commitment (smaller dogs live longer, bigger dogs average much less, about 15 or so years). A parrot can make it 60 - 80 years. So you’d better be damned sure that you’re going to be able to give it your all for the REST OF YOUR LIFE!
No.
Many warm-blooded pets don’t have the same lifespan as parrots. Also, many warm-blooded pets do not requires nearly as much attention as parrots AND will not react as harshly if they don’t get enough attention.
If it would make you feel better,you can now buy frozen feeder rodents, defrost and use as needed…
Parrots are amazing pets, but they are also demanding pets and can be difficult if you don’t know what you are doing. I wouldn’t recommend jumping right in unless you are wholeheartedly committed to taking care of it and get educated about all of the aspects parrot ownership. They are not like a dog or a cat who you can essentially take care of its basic needs and everything else works out. Likening a parrot to a perpetual 2-year-old is pretty accurate. It will make big messes and you can’t just feed it and let it go do its own thing.
In Honduras is pretty common for people to have parrots as pets, mostly old, old ladies that have a very affectionate pet for many years by their side.
Sadly, it is also VERY common for poachers to try to smugle tens of thousands of parrots in closed trucks, or closed containers in ships, where most of them will die, in order to make a fortune selling them in Europe or the US. They were the most common kind of bird one could see in my country, now they are almost gone. It makes me sad.
No one, not old ladies nor people abroad should want to have a bird in a cage. It IS cruel. Parrots are VERY social and, when separated from their kind, WILL need the human owner to be kind and give it lots of attention their whole life, as others have said, that can be many decades.
I rescued a parrot, she is a big bird, and been kept in a cage for 14 years. We are preparing her for release in a national park, but I fear for her ability to survive in the wild, I also care very much for her, she talks and sings a lot, and also uses VERY dirty words, which cracks me up. She has no problem with me petting her, quite the contrary, she loves it.
We are releasing her in two months I believe.
The Norwegian Blue comes very highly recommended, despite a tendency to pine for the fjords.
ARISE!
I am contemplating getting a parakeet. Is this a terrible idea? I know pet stores are evil, but where else would I look? What about getting one from Craigslist? How do I know if a bird is foul-tempered?
Parkeets usually are not foul tempered. However, the last I read about them is that breeders accidently bred a cancer gene into them and they don’t last longer than five years now. You want a young parakeet that’s been weaned by a human being. For parakeets, I doubt that’s there’s a lot of difference between breeders or stores, although your bird will be less expensive from a breeder. I would not go craiglist unless you deal with a breeder instead of a private individual.
The problem is that some birds do not like the unfamiliar and some birds are foul tempered. You won’t know until you’ve had the bird at home for a few weeks. Lastly it really doesn’t matter a lot if a parakeet is foul tempered unless you plan on taking it out of the cage, something I wouldn’t recommend unless you’ve had the wings clipped. Larger parrots are a problem if they are foul tempered because they will bite the shit out of your hand.
If by parakeets you mean budgies, then I would get two. They get lonely when you’re at work and being alone in their cage all day is torture for them. We used to let our budgies out of their cages even though their wings weren’t clipped and they were fine for the most part. They won’t really fly all over your house, they find a couple of places that they like and always fly there. Just make sure you don’t leave a window or patio door with the blinds completely undrawn, because they will try to fly through it since they can’t see that it’s there. Also, be prepared for them to die within a few years since they’re really fragile.
We’ve got a parotlet and he’s an awesome little bugger, not much to add other than people are spot on with them needing a lot of attention and getting one that’s hand raised.
We found someone who breeds them locally and it made a world of difference.
When I was growing up I had a foul-tempered budgie who would fly around, bite anyone in the house but me who got too close, and beat up any other budgie we brought in to be her friend. She spend most of her time in her cage, even though the door was usually open. After a while we gave up trying to find her a friend and got her one of those fake plastic dummy birds for her main perch, and she’d regularly beat the crap out of that, too.
I loved her. She was gorgeous, all silver and black, no blue or green. My family tolerated her for eight years until she died, and then my sister promptly got a cat. No more birds.
I’m allergic to dogs and cats, which is pretty much like being allergic to love, so I’ve had birds pretty much my entire life. I actually love parrots, but as everyone here has said, they take a lot of commitment.
My first recommendation is not to start off with a big bird if you’ve never owned (and tamed and bonded with) a bird before. Due to their beaks, which can easily scissor through bone, parrots require a certain degree of confidence to handle.
Instead, buy a parakeet. Parakeets are cheap, social, adorable, fairly easy to train, smart (parakeets can learn to talk pretty well) and are really easy to clean up after (their droppings are tiny, dry within seconds, and can easily be swept up… unlike the repulsive green slime excretions of larger birds). Most of my favorite parrots have actually been parakeets.
You want to buy a parakeet young. Baby young. The way you tell if a parakeet is young is if its head is covered in bands up to where the feathers meet the nostrils (parakeets “bald” and lose their rings as they get older) and if its eyes are totally black, with no white ring around the pupil (this is the parakeet version of neotony). You also ideally want a male, since they are less bitchy and easier to bond with than females. It can be hard to figure out a parakeet’s sex when they are young: the best way is to look at their nose. You want a pink nose for a boy, where as females will tend to be whiter. This doesn’t work with albino parakeets, but short of getting them surgically sexed, its the best way to figure it out. Only buy one parakeet at a time if you want to tame them. Don’t buy a mirror or any kind of simulacrum bird either.
Once you get your parakeet home, you should put it in a room where you spend a lot of time, then basically give it a week or two to calm down, get accustomed to its surroundings and get used to you. Talk to it constantly in a soothing tone of voice. Give it treats like millet. Make it happy.
After a couple of weeks, you can start the training. I tend to start by opening the cage door, putting my hand slowly into the cage, and wait for the parakeet to get used to it. Once a parakeet gets used to your hand, take your finger, press it firmly against the parakeet’s breast and say “Up!” until it steps onto your finger. Repeat until the parakeet does it without freaking out and is happy to just sit on your finger for a while. At that point, you can try taking him out of his cage. Once he’s out, he’ll probably try to fly around the room, smack into something because he sucks at flying, hit the ground and look startled. When that happens, just pick him up (“Up!”) and speak comfortingly to him, then put him back on top of his cage and continue to do the “Up!” training.
Sometimes parakeets just don’t get used to your hand. In that case, what I usually do is just open the cage door, wait for him to pop out, wait for him to fly around and smack into a wall like a little retard, then do the above. Eventually, they get it… in my experience, it never takes more than a week for a half hour a day.
Once a parakeet understands the “up” command and reliably does it, you should take him out of his cage a lot more. If you spend a lot of time with your parakeet, eventually, it’ll bond with you and want to spend most of its time with you, and you can usually keep it reliably under control. My parakeet, Humbert Humbird, actually spends something like 10 or 12 hours a day out of his cage, happily flying around, but they need to be tame before you can let them do that.
If you like having a parakeet, you might consider a bigger bird. I recommend African Grays or Red-Lored Amazons: they tend not to do a lot of screaming in my experience, and they are low maintenance (buy a cockatoo and it will scream its head off all day and never leave you alone if you’re not scratching its head). Also, make sure to find a hand-fed parrot: this vastly simplifies the training process.
Overall, I really like birds, and they do make excellent pets… but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to just jump into owning one without trying to tame a smaller bird first. At the end of the day, though, everyone here’s right: if you’re not going to spend at least two hours a day with your bird out of its cage, don’t buy one.
If you want your parakeet to bond with you, don’t buy two to start.
A couple of years ago I had two budgies caged in the corner of my living room. One of them was really tame and usually sat on me when it was let out of the cage.
I decided to sell them after a few months because of the extreme amount of feathers they constantly replaced. It was all over my apartment and it drove me crazy. Feathers everywhere, and often much quicker than I cared to vacuum it up. It really surprised me that it was this intense. When I had budgies as a kid I didn’t notice it as much, but of course I wasn’t the only one cleaning the room back then.
Also, the tame budgie was too much in the end. When it was in the cage it was constantly looking at me, as if it was waiting for me to let it out again. It was the only thing it could think about. When I did let it out, it was on me within one or two seconds. There it would sit all the time (for hours even) until I let it in the cage again. It felt like too much of a good thing.
Get a chicken instead.