There is only a sense of the need for affection, comfort, and love and it feels right, but giving into your bird’s constant requests for this type of interaction will result in problem behaviors. But with Linus it is different it feels like hugging a child. The minute she feels the warmth of an embrace she starts to quiver. I know with my Goffin's cockatoo, Theo, it is a sexual thing. It is hard to understand why a cockatoo would want to cuddle with a human being, a predator. The cuddly nature of the cockatoo is their biggest selling point, but also, unfortunately, their downfall. This is the hardest one of all but also the most important, and it is the reason I went on about anthropomorphizing at the beginning of this post. Resist the urge to cuddle your cockatoo.
A cockatoo can cause serious injury to a human foot. Even the feet of seated people are in motion more than we might realize, and from the vantage point of a cockatoo that is on the floor, it may look like an invitation to “interact”. This behavior is very common, and I feel it is tied into over excitement.
If you notice your cockatoo quietly staring at your feet, you need to remove one or the other from the floor right away. What I do know is that they have a foot fetish, and a floor is the place where feet are most commonly found. I don’t know whether it is because they are ground foragers or because their brazen nature makes them unafraid of things that tower over them.
Try to keep your cockatoo off the floor. Remember, you can always initiate more fun times later, but the bite you might receive because you waited too long will be on everyone’s permanent record. You will be wise to end the excitement while it is still of a happy nature. The event often ends with tears and tantrums. It is very much like the child whose birthday party has become overwhelming. There is a tipping point with a cockatoo where excitement becomes aggression. However, they aren’t just pretending to be excited. They are often “arguing” with their humans with very animated, human-like gestures and voice inflections that are an impeccable imitation of human excitement. The videos mentioned above often depict cockatoos in a very excited state. Don’t allow your cockatoo to become over-excited. I will put money on the fact that those videos depict the day’s best 3 minutes with that bird and that the endings of some of the videos were edited out.įor anyone considering a cockatoo, I want to offer three pieces of advice that might help you avoid ruining your life and the life of your new cockatoo. There is an abundance of very entertaining videos posted all over that make life with a cockatoo appear to be the most fun a human could ever hope for with a companion animal. As it turns out, the traits that make us fall in love with cockatoos are the same ones that cause their behavior problems and land them in rescues everywhere. There are specific traits that they have that make it nearly impossible to avoid anthropomorphizing their behavior. The cockatoo, specifically the white ones, are parrots that excel at pulling on our heartstrings. However, our humanness is also the very thing that makes us try so hard to get it right. One of the biggest struggles we have in doing things right for our parrots is with our humanness because it makes something that should be completely natural feel like work. It is even harder to WANT to see things from their perspective because sometimes it is a harsh look at the realities of nature.Īnthropomorphizing is a hole we don’t want to fall into. However, we are human, and it is hard to see things from a parrot’s perspective. The “fort” is a nest and the bird is definitely not playing. It has nothing to do with having found their other half. In reality parrots choose mates based on their ability to produce healthy chicks and defend their nest. However, when we allow ourselves that convenience it causes us to make mistakes in our care for our parrots, such as allowing them to “play” in a “fort” they are building inside a dark cabinet. An example of this would be the presumption that parrots fall in love like humans do based on the fact that they choose a mate for life.Īnthropomorphizing is a tool that many humans use to try to make sense of things that they don’t understand. It means to assign human traits to things that are not human, such as a parrot. If you are the kind of person who has scoured the internet to learn everything available about your parrot, you have no doubt come across this word “anthropomorphism”.
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