On parrots and food and pet food [View All]

[nadinbrzezinski]

well folks all the scandals with the pet food reminded me of one thing, the scam that the pet food providers perpetrate on the American pet owner

Any of you have Parrots, aka conures, african gray, even budgies?

I'm sure most of you are feeding your kids seeds.

Well long story short, we were feeding our nanday seeds mostly because we had tried changing his diet for years...

So one day I take him into the shower to clean up his feathers, and his tail feathers literally fell apart in my hand.

So we take bird to the vet... yep they did the usual teats, but the bird's problem... them seeds. He was malnourished and I knew this because we had been trying to change that diet for years.

I took the bird home and took his seed to the trash. I told him, after filling his dish with a cereal that made up a complete protein, "well you can eat or you can starve."

So the bird avoided eating any of this new food for a day or two... and finally decided that eating that icky food was better than starving.

Funny thing, these days he eats just about anything I put in his dish and has developed a taste for red meat (grubs ain't tofu folks)

But this is a cautionary tale... outside of chocolate and avocado (and coffee,) your birds should eat just about a well balanced died like the one you eat.

Be for warned, they can be stubborn, but every time I go get him a block of wood at the pet sore, they try to sell this junk... which I politely turn down

Now if he needed the calories since he was sick... I'd consider it... but otherwise they are empty calories

Oh and the point of this. think of your dog and your cat. They have lived among humans for oh thousands of years... you think them dogs and cats ate Purina every day for all these years. Nope... table scraps were fine, or pieces of meat from the hunt. The pet industry has created an artificial need, and one that quite brutally honest, we don't need...

Oh and yes they do get their treats, tonight the kids got shaved almonds, they just love them.