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Working it out: Get help when facing behavior problems in pets
By Pet Connection Staff
July 21, 2009
In this week’s Pet Connection, Dr. Marty Becker and Gina Spadafori tackle the tough issue of pet behavior problems:
Biting, destructiveness, noisiness, house-soiling — these problems can be more of a threat to a pet than a disease such as cancer. That’s because too often behavior problems are eventually “solved” by getting rid of the pet, a solution that’s often a dead end for the animal.
Even when people refuse to give up on their pets, behavior problems can mean a lifetime of misery. “Bad” pets may spend their lives locked up, locked out or punished in ways that reflect the frustration and ignorance of their owners but do nothing to solve the problems. It’s safe to say that neither side realizes the full benefits of the human-animal bond in such sad situations.
It doesn’t have to be that way. While some behavior problems aren’t fixable, most can be. To accomplish such change, though, you have to be prepared to put some time into changing the situation. Quick-fix, half-hearted efforts are doomed from the start.
Seeds are a treat for birds, not a diet, our Dr. Becker reminds bird onwers. Get more info here.
In “The Buzz,” Dr. Becker and Mikkel Becker Shannon write about what your dog’s guilty look really means:
Your dog may look guilty, but he’s not feeling that way. A study published in the journal Behavioral Processes had dog owners tell their pets to leave a tasty treat alone before leaving the room. Researchers found that whether or not the dog showed the “guilty” look did not depend on whether the dog had eaten the treat or not, but rather on whether the owner had scolded the dog. Dogs who didn’t eat the treat but were scolded by their owners displayed the “guilty” look more than dogs who had actually eaten the treat, but their owners did not believe they had, and thus didn’t get scolded. The research suggests that “guilt” seen in dogs is not really an effect of the unwanted behavior that the dog performed, but is instead a reaction to the owner’s behavior.
Want more? Read the entire Pet Connection for this week, or view the page (PDF) as it went out to our newspaper clients.
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Dr. Becker writes:
“The trend in recent years has been toward pelleted diets, and pet birds are healthier than ever before as a result.”
Well - SOME birds . . . . . . . .
From http://www.geocities.com/Petsb.....ellets.htm :
“Some breeders I have talked to have had problems with gout as well as kidney damage in cockatiels that eat over 80% pellets. Most pellets have a vitamin D3 level between 400 IU / Kg and 1000 IU / Kg. Excessive vitamin D3 can cause calcification of internal organs and death. In the early 1990’s some pellets had levels over 2,200 IU / Kg,then the research showed that too high levels could be dangerous and most manufacturers lowered their levels.”
Mine was one of those birds. When he died at the age of 4, his bones were solid calcium rather than honeycombed because of the mixed signals his body was getting from the overdose of Vitamin D3 in his pellets and his heart was almost completely encased in gouty crystals.
It may well be that pellets have been remanufactured to address this problem, but I haven’t had the heart to try with my current ‘tiel.
He’s doing well on a fortified seed mix by a well-known manufacturer and supplementation with fruits and vegetables.
I just hope the pellet manufacturers have learned their lesson and are not still making ALL their pellet formulations according to a single recipe (as if pet birds are all a single species) differing only in size.
Comment by The OTHER Pat — July 21, 2009 @ 6:19 am
I think the same problems and challenges apply to commercial bird diets as to commercial dog/cat diets. But I know as a pet-care columnist that so many people are still feeding only seed to their parrots (parrots also includes cockatiels and budgies), and that’s the baseline we’re trying to move up.
Avian veterinarians generally recommend having pellets as a base, complemented (not supplemented) by a wide and ever-changing variety of healthy and most unprocessed foods, everything from veggies/fruits/nuts to scrambled eggs, bread and even, (cough cough) chicken.
Of course, it is completely possible to feed birds a completely home-prepared diet, just as it is in dogs and cats. Seeds are generally better used as treat, not a diet. (They’re EXCELLENT for clicker-training, by the way.)
Finally, remember that all brands are not the same, just as in cat/dog food.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — July 21, 2009 @ 6:27 am
Hmmmm … this just hit me: Isn’t it interesting that avian veterinarians recognize the potential problems in a limited diet of processed food or seed and recommend a WIDE VARIETY of fresh, mostly whole, foods to offset those issues? What a difference from the traditional “no ‘table scraps’, nothing except your ‘completely and balanced’ commercial food” advice traditionally given to owners of cats and dogs.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — July 21, 2009 @ 6:42 am
And that’s what got my previous bird into trouble. I listened to the advice of the “expert bird vet” (I didn’t know at the time to check into board certifications as an avian vet - although there weren’t so many of those around, either) and this “expert” convinced me that seed would kill my bird, and that I needed to feed him a “complete and balanced” pelleted diet for him to be his most healthy.
And - just like all those cat owners giving their sick cats “melamine-in-a-can” - I was slowly but surely poisoning my bird every time I refilled his food dish.
“Complete and balanced”. Yeah. Not in MY lifetime!
I just hope bird owners are getting the message and that there weren’t too many other birds out there who suffered and died the way mine did.
Comment by The OTHER Pat — July 21, 2009 @ 6:50 am