Safety Hazards for Parakeets

Video Transcript

"In this clip we are going to talk about dangers for these birds in the household and otherwise. The number one loss for these birds, is flight. If these guys are flighted, you need to be really careful if you have them loose in your household. A lot of these birds aren't tame. People get them and they only have two or three of them. As you are opening the cage doors to clean their cages these guys will get startled and fly away. And when they panic, they fly and they don't come back. They fly out your windows. They fly out your front door. You will be thinking that every thing is sealed and you go clean the papers and your daughter, son, husband walks in through the front door and that bird just flies right out. You need to be very careful when cleaning their cages if these birds are flighted. It seems to be the number one way to loose them. Once they get loose outside, predators will get to them very quickly. These guys are not suited to live in the United States, they are not native here and they don't survive. The other dangers you need to worry about, is Teflon pans. If they are heated to a high temperature, they give off some fumes that the birds inhale which causes them basically to fell off their perch dead. There is nothing that you can do about it and it is very quickly. It is kind of a silent killer. So, if you have them in the kitchen and if you are going to cook with Teflon, move them to another room in the house, so that you can protect them. Aerosols, spraying for bugs, spraying perfumes around the house, all those sort of things, these birds have very very sensitive upper repository tracts and so if you have any sort of aerosol it can irritate their lungs. And, these guys only have a few breaths before they'll die. So you need to be very careful with aerosols around the house. And lastly, they are so so tiny, basically anything in your house, a dog, a cat, anything, they can get squished in a door, if they get mouthed, even a little tiny bit by your dog or cat, or by your kid, they will just squished. There is not a whole lot to them, they are not that robust, they are mostly feathers. You have to be fairly careful with these birds. At least in a physical way. Those are most of your household dangers. And again, if you are cooking and the birds are loose, be careful with them landing on a hot pan. You don't want toilet seats open if they are flying around your house because they can fly in it and drowned. Just be careful, you want to make sure that if you ever let these guys loose out of their cage, you basically bombproof your house. You make sure that every little nook and cranny has been looked at for. And, if they are alone in their cages and if you have smaller pets and it is a smaller cage, they cannot knock their cage over and let either the bird to fly out or they can't reach through the bars. Like a cat might dig through the bars if they are small enough and be able to grab hold of the bird. And, if the bird is outside if you let these guys outside to get some fresh sunshine, raccoons have been known to break into their cages and tear through the bars and ripped into these guys. So you have to be very careful if you leave them outside for any period of time. That more or less covers it, just be careful because your birds are very small and much more sensitive to chemicals then many other pets are. "