The cuddly nature of the cockatoo is their biggest selling point, but also, unfortunately, their downfall. This is the hardest one of all but also the most important, and it is the reason I went on about anthropomorphizing at the beginning of this post. Resist the urge to cuddle your cockatoo.A cockatoo can cause serious injury to a human foot. Even the feet of seated people are in motion more than we might realize, and from the vantage point of a cockatoo that is on the floor, it may look like an invitation to “interact”. This behavior is very common, and I feel it is tied into over excitement. If you notice your cockatoo quietly staring at your feet, you need to remove one or the other from the floor right away. What I do know is that they have a foot fetish, and a floor is the place where feet are most commonly found. I don’t know whether it is because they are ground foragers or because their brazen nature makes them unafraid of things that tower over them. Try to keep your cockatoo off the floor.Remember, you can always initiate more fun times later, but the bite you might receive because you waited too long will be on everyone’s permanent record. You will be wise to end the excitement while it is still of a happy nature. The event often ends with tears and tantrums.
It is very much like the child whose birthday party has become overwhelming. There is a tipping point with a cockatoo where excitement becomes aggression. However, they aren’t just pretending to be excited. They are often “arguing” with their humans with very animated, human-like gestures and voice inflections that are an impeccable imitation of human excitement. The videos mentioned above often depict cockatoos in a very excited state.
In reality parrots choose mates based on their ability to produce healthy chicks and defend their nest. However, when we allow ourselves that convenience it causes us to make mistakes in our care for our parrots, such as allowing them to “play” in a “fort” they are building inside a dark cabinet. An example of this would be the presumption that parrots fall in love like humans do based on the fact that they choose a mate for life.Īnthropomorphizing is a tool that many humans use to try to make sense of things that they don’t understand. It means to assign human traits to things that are not human, such as a parrot. If you are the kind of person who has scoured the internet to learn everything available about your parrot, you have no doubt come across this word “anthropomorphism”.