danandlouie wrote:
note to EARTHTOERIKA......thank you for taking in rainman. not too long ago i was part of an animal sanctuary that took in the most damaged of the damaged. we fondly called ourselves the 'home for the hopeless'. we knew dogs, cats and rabbits but were not up on birds or lizards. we could have used you!
one of our macaws,maxie, had been 'owned' for about 10 years by an elderly lady who kept her for her grandkids to play with. those little bastards would throw things at her and taught her to say terrible things. she was locked in a conure size cage and never let out. finally the old b***h died and her daughter called us to take maxie. we could not say no and she came to our place. she would hurt you at any chance.
we constructed a 120 cubic foot enclosure for her, her first chance to spread her wings in more than 10 years. she had picked every feather she could get to, something we could never get her to stop. her veterinarian devised a correct diet for her. we did everything we could for her. she eventually would accept myself and the lady who owned the property and stopped with the cursing. she would call out to us by saying 'mother' and one day crawled on the directors shoulder and walked around with her. tears were flowing. all the hard work we had put in to help maxie was paying off in several ways.
i hope you and rain man have many good years together.
Thanks for the kind words, and bless you for all you did to help that macaw. Parrots have such a hard life in this world, and it's always heartwarming to hear of one that found a happy ending.
My husband deserves most of the credit for rehabilitating our parrot... he's the one who is able to pretend something doesn't hurt when it does, so he can be bitten without giving the bird the automatic reward of getting a reaction for the bite. Once a parrot learns that biting does him no good, he bites a lot less.
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Erika Hammerschmidt:
Author of "Born on the Wrong Planet," "Kea's Flight" and other books