Animalspirit

Why do people want to cuddle parrots? I don't think a parrot,and in particular an African Grey parrot, is an animal that really likes to be cuddled. In the wild, an African Grey is only preened by its partner. We humans often prefer to buy our Greys as young as possible, so that they get used to be cuddled. But why should we do so? Do we really want a partner relationship with our bird? Or do we want a bird that doesn't know how to really behave lika an African Grey should do? In other species of parrots, especially the south-american parrots, we see that other family members and friends within the flock preen each other. In my own flock I observed the amazons preening several other birds, and also feeding them. My timneh grey is a wild-caught 40-something male bird, that really doesn't like to be touched. I come across many African Greys that are cuddled and hand-fed, that have many problems, among them plucking and agressiveness. Of course, you can train your bird in accepting a scratch on the head. And if Fernando, my timneh, really wants to be scratched, I will train him to get over his fear. But the question is: does he really want?

The test message worked. So now i will tell you how I got here. I am a regular poster on a dutch parrot forum, and one of the other members was in search of a story she had been reading on the web. She lost the link, but the story was about a grey parrot and how it got its red tail. I put a few keywords in google and I found the story... on this site. In search of the name of the original author, ( to put with the story) I registrated on this forum. So here I am! I am living together with seven parrots, two dogs, a cat and three fish. One of the parrots is a timneh african grey. Nearly all animals are adopted. I am studying to become a parrot behavior therapist and a professional bird trainer. I also do educational and musical presentations with my birds. I am also a writer, a storyteller and a singer.

I tried to post here, but I got a funny message about the administrator having disabled something. So this is a test message before I write my introduction message again.