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Title : Abstinence Only-Education for Parakeets
link : Abstinence Only-Education for Parakeets
Abstinence Only-Education for Parakeets
Does avian sex-ed exist? I’m guessing no. I’m generally not a fan of abstinence-only education, but when it comes to Violet and Steele, the two parakeets Isaac successfully lobbied me into getting from PetCo, it's the only acceptable route. I'll back up for a minute to explain how Violet and Steele (original proposed names Ruffnut and Tuffnut or Fred and George) came to be members of our family.
Isaac and I were killing time at PetCo one day, which is Juneau's only zoo and a place Isaac likes to window-shop. The store smells like death, but that's because it's housing rodents, reptiles, birds, fish, amphibians, rabbits, and all of their food and excrement. So it's understandable and after awhile in there olfactory fatigue takes over and you don't notice that there are chinchilla turds in your nose.
"Not today," I told him, as he insistently pressed the issue of parakeet ownership while deploying his most cloying voice and most crestfallen expression. "Maybe another day."
I felt sort of bad about it. I grew up with cats, gerbils, and guinea pigs, but am now somehow deathly allergic to anything with fur. Even a weekend with Oliver, the class rabbit, proved too much for my histamine response. We have an aquatic frog named Squiggles, but as Isaac correctly notes, Squiggles "doesn't do anything." My retort is that he (or she) croaks out mellifluously in the night for a lover that will never arrive, but Isaac remains unimpressed.
Isaac loves animals. Absolutely loves them. He will pick up and cuddle everything from a gecko to a spider to a puppy or a rat. He's always been this way. One of my earliest Isaac memories is taking him to the gorilla exhibit at the Bronx Zoo in his little car seat carrier. A female gorilla came right up to the glass and began pointing and gesticulating wildly at him, eager, it seemed, to mother another primate.
Eventually Isaac wore me down about the parakeets, and Paige and I returned home from a weekend in Anchorage to find Violet and Steele in our abode.
I had placed two conditions on the purchase of the parakeets. Well, three: (1) Isaac had to pay for them with his own money; (2) he had to read about how to take care of them and do it every day; and (3) we had to get two, because sentencing a lone parakeet to a life of solitude without a cell-mate seemed mean.
This last condition was problematic, though, because a quick Google search of "how to sex a parakeet" both drops weird cookies on your computer and makes clear that it is not easy to determine if you have two parakeets of the same sex or, God forbid, a mating pair. Something about the color of the "cere" which is the little hard piece over their beak might be a clue, but the basic gist is it's a crap shoot and you can't tell the sex unless you do a DNA sample, and my living room is not 23&Me meets Jurassic fucking Park, now is it?
Which is where abstinence-only education for parakeets comes in.
They are loud as all ever-loving fuck (I was warned about this). And I know you can teach them how to talk. But can you teach them to say "let's not fuck?" And have them actually internalize it and mean it? I hope so, because the last thing I want is to wake up to a parakeet egg (or worse, eggs plural) in Violet and Steele's cage.
Because then my options are limited, and each one seems worse than the last. I wouldn't even know if the eggs were fertilized eggs or if one or both of the birds was a girl and just squirting out unfertilized eggs? That being said:
(a) I could let them incubate the eggs and--potentially--make a bunch of baby parakeets that I would then do . . . I'm not sure what with? I don't think the parakeet breeding and adoption market is particularly hot, though I haven't done a focus group or anything.
(b) I could remove the egg and compost it and/or return it to Mother Earth where a lucky raven or eagle would have it for breakfast.
(c) I could have it for breakfast.
Option (c) sounds disgusting. I eat chicken eggs so why should this be worse, and yet somehow it is worse. Much. Option (b) seems a little close to abortion to me. Don't get me wrong---I am fully pro choice. But I don't think Violet and Steele could consent to a compost-abortion, and consent is critical. Therefore, without knowing whether the eggs were fertilized, I don't think I would feel comfortable hucking them over the edge of my deck into the Tongass beyond.
Sadly, I think option (a) is the only possible solution. I know what's going to happen. I can already tell. There will be eggs and I am going to let nature take its course. The only thing that will fix this is repeating "please don't fuck" to Violet and Steele over and over again until they too can repeat it over and over again and actually act on it by refraining from copulating.
Good luck to me.
Isaac and I were killing time at PetCo one day, which is Juneau's only zoo and a place Isaac likes to window-shop. The store smells like death, but that's because it's housing rodents, reptiles, birds, fish, amphibians, rabbits, and all of their food and excrement. So it's understandable and after awhile in there olfactory fatigue takes over and you don't notice that there are chinchilla turds in your nose.
"Not today," I told him, as he insistently pressed the issue of parakeet ownership while deploying his most cloying voice and most crestfallen expression. "Maybe another day."
I felt sort of bad about it. I grew up with cats, gerbils, and guinea pigs, but am now somehow deathly allergic to anything with fur. Even a weekend with Oliver, the class rabbit, proved too much for my histamine response. We have an aquatic frog named Squiggles, but as Isaac correctly notes, Squiggles "doesn't do anything." My retort is that he (or she) croaks out mellifluously in the night for a lover that will never arrive, but Isaac remains unimpressed.
Isaac loves animals. Absolutely loves them. He will pick up and cuddle everything from a gecko to a spider to a puppy or a rat. He's always been this way. One of my earliest Isaac memories is taking him to the gorilla exhibit at the Bronx Zoo in his little car seat carrier. A female gorilla came right up to the glass and began pointing and gesticulating wildly at him, eager, it seemed, to mother another primate.
Eventually Isaac wore me down about the parakeets, and Paige and I returned home from a weekend in Anchorage to find Violet and Steele in our abode.
I had placed two conditions on the purchase of the parakeets. Well, three: (1) Isaac had to pay for them with his own money; (2) he had to read about how to take care of them and do it every day; and (3) we had to get two, because sentencing a lone parakeet to a life of solitude without a cell-mate seemed mean.
This last condition was problematic, though, because a quick Google search of "how to sex a parakeet" both drops weird cookies on your computer and makes clear that it is not easy to determine if you have two parakeets of the same sex or, God forbid, a mating pair. Something about the color of the "cere" which is the little hard piece over their beak might be a clue, but the basic gist is it's a crap shoot and you can't tell the sex unless you do a DNA sample, and my living room is not 23&Me meets Jurassic fucking Park, now is it?
Which is where abstinence-only education for parakeets comes in.
They are loud as all ever-loving fuck (I was warned about this). And I know you can teach them how to talk. But can you teach them to say "let's not fuck?" And have them actually internalize it and mean it? I hope so, because the last thing I want is to wake up to a parakeet egg (or worse, eggs plural) in Violet and Steele's cage.
Because then my options are limited, and each one seems worse than the last. I wouldn't even know if the eggs were fertilized eggs or if one or both of the birds was a girl and just squirting out unfertilized eggs? That being said:
(a) I could let them incubate the eggs and--potentially--make a bunch of baby parakeets that I would then do . . . I'm not sure what with? I don't think the parakeet breeding and adoption market is particularly hot, though I haven't done a focus group or anything.
(b) I could remove the egg and compost it and/or return it to Mother Earth where a lucky raven or eagle would have it for breakfast.
(c) I could have it for breakfast.
Option (c) sounds disgusting. I eat chicken eggs so why should this be worse, and yet somehow it is worse. Much. Option (b) seems a little close to abortion to me. Don't get me wrong---I am fully pro choice. But I don't think Violet and Steele could consent to a compost-abortion, and consent is critical. Therefore, without knowing whether the eggs were fertilized, I don't think I would feel comfortable hucking them over the edge of my deck into the Tongass beyond.
Sadly, I think option (a) is the only possible solution. I know what's going to happen. I can already tell. There will be eggs and I am going to let nature take its course. The only thing that will fix this is repeating "please don't fuck" to Violet and Steele over and over again until they too can repeat it over and over again and actually act on it by refraining from copulating.
Good luck to me.
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