by Pajarita » Sun Jun 25, 2017 10:09 am
In my personal opinion, taking her to the funeral will just stress her out. I know that Liz says that they need to see the dead person but what really stresses them out is losing the person and whether this happens through simple rehoming or actual death makes no difference to them. Parrots are not explorers. They are born into a large family living in an established territory and they live their entire lives and die surrounded by the same family and in the same territory so, when you expose them to strange places and people, they get stressed out. People who take their birds out for walks start when they are very young and do it very gradually so as not to stress them out more than necessary because the process of getting used to this is stressful to them and make no mistake about it. People would tell you that their bird loves going outside, that he/she is like a small child, looking around all the time, as in a circus or some sort of amusement park but, in reality, the parrot is actually quite anxious and stressed out and its 'looking around as in awe' is nothing more than hypervigilance and fear.
I applaud you for your intentions of using her to teach about parrots but not all parrots are good for that. Some species are more gregarious than others... cockatoos, for example, are normally hams that adore attention and would gladly meet a stranger and dance for him/her just to get a reaction. Macaws are not so easy to read because they tend to be laid back and good-natured so they don't seem to be so stressed out when meeting strangers but I've known of several that were regularly introduced to students that started plucking after a few years (two of them were rehomed because of that). The thing about parrots is that they like their routine and they don't like new things or changes so whenever something as unnatural as meeting new people all the time or being taken out for walks in strange and, as far as the bird is concerned, potentially dangerous places (all strange places are considered potentially dangerous by a prey animal), one needs to be extra careful and go very, very slowly AFTER the human learns the bird's body language like the palm of his/her hand AND the bird is deeply, deeply bonded and trusts its human implicitly - and this takes a good couple of years with a rehomed parrot and only if the person does everything right.
Parrots are, in my personal opinion, the hardest animals to keep as pets... I mean, anybody can acquire and keep a parrot but keeping them happy and healthy and stress free is HUGELY difficult!