Navre wrote:Baby birds love everyone.
I disagree with this. I think this misconception is one of the greatest fuels for the baby parrot myth. Baby birds don't love anyone. They are just a naive, helpless creature that eats and poops. The fact that some (not even the case with a lot of poorly raised ones) don't bite does not mean that they love anyone. So many buyers get fooled into thinking that baby bird likes them just cause they were able to get their hands all over it at the store. NO!
Agreed that you cannot touch or pick up most adult parrots (at rescues, homes, etc). That is the true nature of wild parrots. Just by chance some of them bond to people and allow this and others can be taught by training. However, that naive helpless baby sitting in a tank at a store isn't deciding that it will comply because it likes you. Heck, it's probably not thinking of anything besides being hungry for the next feeding. That baby doesn't walk over and step up onto your hand by itself of its own will. It just stands at the bottom of the tank doing nothing. Yet humans walk in and scoop it up with their hands and the helpless naive baby does not even know or think to resist. It doesn't bite you like most older parrots would out of self defense in the same case.
This lack of resistance isn't love. It's the human misinterpreting helplessness and lack of resistance for rational complainance. We know it's a lie because most of those babys grow up to bite the same humans that thought the bird loved them when they first saw it as a baby.
I can't necessarily confirm the relationship my parrots have to me to be love but what I can say is that they will all deliberately make a voluntary uncoerced effort to put themselves onto me. If I stick my hand into one of their cages, they will make the effort to climb down from wherever they are to put themselves onto my hand. Or from out of the cage they will fly over to me. Sometimes they will bow their head to be scratched and sometimes for nothing else than to hang out.
The baby in the store does none of this. It is like a stuffed animal. It just stands there, allowing the human to do to it what he wants and be under the illusion that this is reciprocated love. The human will even go so far as to think the bird chose him. Silly, isn't it? To take the inexperienced lack of resistance of a 3 month baby and interpret all these things for it?
When the baby grows up and actually develops a mind of its own, people don't know what to do with the wild animal that it is and either neglect it or dump it at a rescue. I guess that baby love did not mean anything after all. You cannot expect such a helpless, undeveloped, inexperienced child to be mentally capable of making a life choice such as "choosing you." Certainly you can choose the bird but the bird isn't mature enough or equipped to make a binding long term choice itself. It can easily change its mind the next day. It's like a toddler changing his mind about his favorite color from time to time. It's not something you would expect to necessarily stick for life.
The relationship with a parrot is what you make it. This is why it doesn't make so big a difference whether you get it as a baby or an adult. It's going to be a heck of a lot of work and a journey in either case. The only difference is whether there will be a naive one year window where the bird allows you to secure a good relationship for the adulthood or screw it all up.