pet connection

When I first brought home my parrot, he was a hand-fed baby. Eddie was adorable and sweet-natured, fully-weaned and well-socialized. He loved to snuggle, loved to be petted and loved nothing more than just to be near me.

A couple years later, though, our relationship changed. He grew protective of me, and wanted to attack anyone else — human or animal — who came between us. When we were alone, he lunged at me. What happened to my sweet parrot baby?

Now, I’d helped to write “Birds For Dummies,” so I knew where a lot of this behavior was coming from. But Eddie was still being a major pain even with the work I was doing with him, so I called my “Birds FD” co-author, Dr. Brian Speer, who just happens to be about the best avian vet in the world.

Dr. Speer laughed when I called and said that, yes, I was having some behavioral problems because of flock order issues — Eddie was the top bird, in the bird’s view — but mostly what I was experiencing was the rage of a jealous spouse. Newly sexually mature and with me the only vaguely mate-able living being in reach, Eddie was letting me know he was The Man. All six ounces of him.

So we went through with Dr. Speer what I jokingly referred to as marriage counseling, or rather un-marriage counseling, with me spending time with Eddie in ways that made it clear to the feathered little beast that I wasn’t the love of his life but rather a benevolent overlord from a strange and different species.

We did this with a lot of training exercises and some environmental and body language changes. Eddie is back no longer a jealous, abusive spouse but a wonderful avian companion, back to whistling “Here she is … Miss America,” when I walk in the house. (Yes, I taught him that. Kinda sad, huh? He also does the Florida State war chant, but can’t do the chop to go with it. Go ‘Noles.)

I tell this story by way of illustrating that life with a parrot can be a serious pain the fanny. That’s because they’re extremely intelligent and also not more than a generation or two from being wild, not really domesticated. They’re a fish out of water, so to speak, and their behavior problems are oftentimes a symptom of a poor adaptation to an environment that doesn’t make a lot of sense to their instinctive understanding of what the world should be like.

Parrots, in other words, can be one of the most challenging pets around. (And, I must quickly add, one of the most rewarding!)

My “relationship issues” with little Eddie the lovestruck caique are why I laughed out loud when an e-mail from Hammacher Schlemmer popped into my mailbox, advertising an interactive parrot. It’s a real bargain at $79.95 compared to the price of a real parrot, which in the case of most common pet species starts in the hundreds of dollars and can top out in the thousands for a bird such as the hyacinth macaw.

Anyway, from the catalog:

Using voice recognition technology, this interactive parrot can record and repeat phrases spoken to it, and it responds to phrases such as “Are you hungry?” with preprogrammed responses. The parrot can be programmed with additional phrases that it repeats at random in a classic parrot squawk, and it has a full range of movement that mimics a real parrot, including head bobbing, flapping wings, and cooing sounds. The parrot gives a kiss when its beak is touched, and its mouth sensor detects the included plastic cracker when it is placed near the beak, prompting the parrot to “eat” the cracker. The parrot dances when it hears music, and goes to sleep when you say “good night” or when its light sensor detects low ambient light. Includes a perch, plastic cracker, and remote control.

For most people, that’s the perfect pet parrot, and I wholly recommend it! A real parrot … give it a lot of thought. They can be difficult to manage, and some of them live as long as we do — a long time to have a troublesome pet.  (And did I mention: They’re quite messy, too!)