I don't know how my birds feel, I'm not a bird noor am I physic. But just through experience and reactions. I have pulled broken blood feathers before and have pulled normal.adult feathers. I have never gotten a bird screaming in pain from a pulled adult feather, but I have always, every-single-time, gotten a bird screaming in pain from a broken blood feather. Just experience other than this I have no idea.
Now Im confused. I completely responded to your whole post, quote below is what your saidOK I'm getting dizzy with you answering in circles again
My post was about pulling non bleeding feathers out of a bird with no pain relief provided. You respond about leaving broken blood feathers in until they die off but you pulled non bleeding feathers out of your bird ????
OK I'll just ask this, why did you NOT provide any pain relieving measures to your baby macaw when you pulled out her feathers?
I completely answered your post about pulling blood feathers and how tender they are. Everyone seems to believe that pulling a broken blood feathers is an acceptable OK course of action. BUT however through person experience, I feel its a very dangerous and painful thing to do. More so than pulling an adult feather.
I understand where your coming from and respect your knowledge and experience. However I had to decide what was best for Mera. I have no proof if pulling a blood feather is more so pain or less so painful than pulling an adult feather. I do know from experience this is what it appears to be like, and from the fact that if you accidently pinch it during a preening session they will let you know the pain you caused them versus if you accidently pinched or pulled or plucked out a regular feather.
When I decided to pull the few feathers that I did, yes, it was not an emergency. But should I wait until it is an emergency? Should I wait until her and her friend (Opa) chew them down to the skin(if you look closely in the picture I provided in my first post, it shows the flight and tail feathers being so strandy and splitting) and possibly cause a feather cyst and cause possible future problems (feather barbering, follicle issues, more crashings, injuries, etc)?. So many negative probabilities if I had decided to leave the feathers in. I have no regrets pulling the feathers. They needed to go. It has relieved her and Opa from chewing on the feathers and from her landing bad, she hasnt landed poorly since before those feathers were pulled, she isnt preening right after a landing, she isnt crashing, no possible future negative outcome of this except the very small chance that the follicle could be damaged, but I had checked them this morning and they are closed up and Im sure in less than a week from now I should see new development. She is no longer in discomfort, she is happy, healthy, retain her flight, landing better. I see nothing negative out of any of this. The only negative thing that I did was restrain her for about 10 seconds or less (it was a very quick procedure) and cause small amount of pain to the better of her health and well being. We dont bash someone for accidently clipping a blood feather, pulling a blood feather when a more safer and humane course of action would be to pinch the blood feather and coagulate it with cayenne pepper WHICH IS A PAIN RELIEVER, or from accidently or purposely clipping nails too short, for plucking feathers for DNA. I dont see why avian avenue should bash someone's belief that feather extraction of tail or flight when many here could be accused or "unintentionally" hurting their birds by clipping nails, wings, pulling feathers for whatever reason. Just because its "new" to everyone or is of different belief, doesnt make it wrong. As I have pointed out that there are other things that cause pain and harm to our birds for whatever reasons and all of those are of common practiceI wouldnt pull feathers for DNA or otherwise, but there is honestly no comparison for the pain involved in pulling a chest feather (which is not attached to bone) vs a flight feather which is. There is also a BIG difference in pulling a feather in an emergency vs one that is not an emergency and could be done in a more humane manner. Just because they dont scream or flinch when these feathers are preened doesnt mean it doesnt hurt when they are ripped out of the follicle
. No one should judge especially when no intentional abuse/pain/harm was meant in either pulling broken blood feathers, nail clippings accidently/or purposely cut too short, pulled belly feathers or pulling a couple flight or tail feathers. All of these done was for the better health of our birds with probably NO pain reliever involved(!), no one should judge as Im sure most everyone has done one or the other of these.
Im just going to bring up these couple of posts from Billie Faye
Im sorry if what I did to my bird affected you in any way both mentally and emotionally. But this is when you need to realize that we are on the web and everyone has there own opinion and belief. I cringe whenever I hear of people clipping their bird's nails too short and shrugging it off like nothing, I cringe when I hear its acceptable practice to pull a blood feather instead of leaving it be and coagulating it and letting it die out on its own. But I accept that these actions are what people needed to do at the time to help their birds. Sometimes you have to accept that the other person's situation is not your situation, its their's and even when your heart is crying and hurting because it goes against your beliefs, know that your not in their shoes and hopefully the person doing it loves their birds and takes care of them and cherishes them for who and what they are and tries to provide the best they possibly can do. Thats the only thing we can do sadly. I didnt post any of this to hurt anyone, just to post it because I feel its beneficial for anyone who is researching this and is in the same situation and boat I was/am in. *hugs*
After reading these posts it is clear that you did this to Mera just because you didn't want to wait for her to simply molt them out on their own. You just can't stand the thought of having to wait any longer then you have to before you get to see her with an entire set of perfect feathers.
I would like to ask that you please reconsider your stance on yanking out ANY perfectly healthy feather out of any bird, especially one as large and deep as the flight or tail feathers and if you think it's something that really needs to be done for the bird's immediate safety. If it's not for immediate safety - please take the bird to see a vet or even two vets so you can compare their opinions and evaluate the actual necessity.
Look at your own posts that you wrote about this - it's clearly evident that you have wanted to pull these out for at least a week and you have been posting little hints that this was the direction that you were headed. You pulled out all of these feathers for nothing more than your own desire to see what she looks like once she has a complete set of unbroken feathers. To me that is unconscionable and I am in disbelief that you continue to try to pass off your actions as necessary when it is so obvious that it wasn't.
Please reconsider your actions as you continue to contemplate pulling out her remaining feathers. I agree that birds were meant to fly but they weren't meant to fly inside of a house. If you are unable or unwilling to provide a safe environment for your flighted birds please consider alternatives. You should adjust, change, remodel, reconfigure the HOUSE to conform to your birds safety - No one should ever reconfigure an ANIMAL to conform to the house!
That is just plain wrong and I could not continue to sit here and watch you try to justify your actions by continually saying that you had to do it for her safety.
No you did not!
I really hope that anyone who happens across this thread while searching for help or looking for information about this subject will take the time to read ALL of the posts so that they don't just see your original post and think that this is normal to just randomly pull out feathers for whatever reason.
Any type of harm(physical, psychological, emotional, health wise, what have you) or possible negative thing associated with me, be it plucking a blood feather, clipping a nail too short, or extracting feathers or even stealing back a cookie my birds took from me, I dislike doing. I'm a pushover when it comes to my birds. This was a hard decision I had to make and I thought about it for weeks and mentioned here on this site several times too that this course of action was a possibility if certain things got worst. I hate being the "bad guy" when it comes to my or any bird. I dislike it. I dislike these tough decisions one has to make at times. Many may disagree with someone's decisions, but sometimes its hard trying to figure out which is the lesser evil at that moment in time. And although I dislike what I did (who would actually like doing such hard things) I still believe it was the better of any of the options mentioned here except feather imping which I wish I had Gra's flights still which I would have used for Mera.
I so agree with everything lora said above. You'll never convince me you did the right thing, for baby mera.I sometimes think people get delusions of grandeur in their heads.Then do things a professional should be doing.Or come up with these half cocked ideas on what is right.Think of the darn pain you caused her for no reason at all! I hope and pray in the future you really think before doing this ever again.
