flyzipper
Rollerblading along the road
Celebirdy of the Month
Mayor of the Avenue
Avenue Spotlight Award
This is a case study put out by the Association of Avian Veterinarians (spoiler alert... sleeping huts are bad for our birds even if it doesn't look like they're chewing it).
Even if our birds don't look like they're chewing, they're at risk.
That's in addition to the risk of getting tangled in loose threads, and the hormonal triggers that can also happen with small enclosed spaces.
- Chapter 1: Case example of foreign body material ingestion
- Chapter 2: Gogy gets admitted
- Chapter 3: Diagnosing GI Foreign Body through Barium Study and Fluoroscopic Imagery
- Chapter 4: Gogy Goes to Surgery
- Chapter 5: watch their blog for the next installment, or read more about why polyester is bad in general, and some safer alternatives.
After pulling the (surgically extracted) wad apart, we could see that the deeper fibers had retained their original green color.
We discussed the discovery with Gogy’s family and asked if they had any ideas about where this material had come from. They did – the fibers matched those of a green, fleece sleeping hut she had used for many years. While she enjoyed spending time in this hut, she had not appeared to chew on it, at least not enough to visibly damage the fabric. I mentioned in a previous post how even birds who don’t seem to be chewing on fleece fabric can still develop a GI foreign body composed of its polyester fibers. This was true for Gogy. The evidence pointed to ingestion and gradual accumulation of these fine fibers over a long period of time. Only once the wad of fibers had become large enough to partially obstruct her GI tract did she develop clear symptoms of illness.
Even if our birds don't look like they're chewing, they're at risk.
That's in addition to the risk of getting tangled in loose threads, and the hormonal triggers that can also happen with small enclosed spaces.