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Part 2
How To Tell If You REALLY HAVE An Avian Vet
So there are lots of vets out there who will "see birds" who have perhaps less knowledge than one might wish. The following are a few tips that may help you differentiate between these people and their more knowledgeable colleagues. You don’t necessarily have a REAL avian vet if:
1. When you call for an appointment for a sick bird, the receptionist tells you it's too cold to bring a bird out. The vet may be experienced with birds, but his or her support staff is not. There are plenty of easy tricks to keeping a bird warm in transit -- which is definitely preferable to allowing the bird to die at home without professional help.
2. When you arrive at the hospital for your appointment and nobody knows what kind of bird you have. If you have a rare species, be fair -- but if they think your cockatiel is a cockatoo, there's a problem.
3. Everyone at the hospital is afraid of your two month-old baby macaw. Many bird vets have difficulty finding experienced avian technicians -- but the vet must know how to handle the animals if his/her support staff does not. If everyone on staff is afraid of a baby, no matter how big, then they have little or no experience with parrots.
4. The veterinarian does not remove the bird from its cage to do a full physical exam. The days of diagnosing from the outside of the cage are gone. To do competent avian medicine, a vet has to do a proper physical exam, and to do that, a vet must TOUCH the animal.
5. The veterinarian does not weigh your bird. Properly equipped avian vets will have an accurate gram scale with which to get weights on their patients every time the bird comes in. A current, accurate weight is not only necessary to properly calibrate a medication dose, but also to help the vet evaluate the overall condition of the animal. From my experience, "Feeling the keel" does NOT provide sufficient information.
6. The veterinarian and/or support staff does not spend considerable time discussing proper diet with you. The most common cause of medical problems seen in avian medicine in this country is STILL malnutrition, therefore proper diet is crucial and should be discussed in depth.
7. They schedule bird appointments every 10-15 minutes. There is a tremendous amount of time involved when seeing birds -- the avian vets I know schedule bird appointments for a minimum of 30 minutes, with most lasting considerably longer than that.
8. They don't think annual check-ups are necessary. The AAV recommends annual visits, especially with very young or old birds. A vet in my area recently told the first-time parrot owner of an unweaned macaw chick that he didn't need to bring the baby back in "unless he thought there was a problem." As far as I am concerned, that is very bad advice. Weaning is an extremely stressful period in a parrot's life, and a brand new parrot owner often doesn't know there is a problem until it has reached emergency status. This is NOT the best thing for the bird!
9. They consider a beak trim to be just as routine as a nail trim or wing clip. Generally speaking, a normal parrot beak does not ever need trimming, whether the bird chews on a "beak conditioner" or not. A change in the growth pattern of a parrot's beak could be indicative of a medical problem.
10. With a new bird check-up, the vet does a physical exam and pronounces the bird "healthy" without recommending any diagnostic testing. A properly done physical exam can tell an experienced avian vet a great deal, but by itself it simply isn't enough. Diagnostic testing must be done to rule out the possibility of latent disease.
The Grand Tour
If possible, ask for a tour of the hospital. Schedule one for later if the hospital is busy. If your veterinarian is serious about avian medicine, you should see some basic equipment:
a gram scale capable of weighing even tiny birds with great accuracy (already mentioned)
incubator cages for hospitalized birds
proper diet for hospitalized birds -- not just "parrot mix" and pellets, but vegetables and fruits, also.
Ideally, a separate room for hospitalized birds, away from dogs & cats.
Proper Teaching
If your bird is sick and the vet wants you to medicate at home, it is incredibly important that you should be properly taught how to accomplish this. You should NOT, for example, be told with oral medications to "squirt it in the back of the mouth." Medicating by mouth incorrectly can lead to aspiration pneumonia and death, so it is critical (understatement) that you be instructed correctly.
Unrelated But Important
While I'm on the subject of avian veterinarians, I do want to mention something that is basically unrelated but extremely important. DO NOT ASSUME that your avian vet will be available off-hours if you and your bird have an emergency. After all, emergencies rarely happen during the working day. So an important question to ask is how does your avian vet deal with emergencies? Are they available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? If so, you can be sure they won't be for long --- NO ONE can live like that forever. If not, to whom do they refer? Does that hospital have experience with birds? If your vet does not have emergency back-up for avian patients, then you need to find someone who does. The LAST thing you need to do is to wait for an emergency to happen, and THEN start looking around for a bird vet. ASK YOUR AVIAN VET ABOUT EMERGENCY COVERAGE NOW.
In Conclusion.........
If your veterinarian fulfills all these criteria, chances are excellent that you have a qualified avian practitioner. Stick with him or her, be patient if they don't call you back in two minutes if you have a question. Ask them to explain things you don't understand, especially when it comes to the care of your bird. Be reasonable and don't expect them to spend hours on the phone with you answering every little question you might have. But most importantly, please, when it comes to the treatment of your animal, follow their instructions to the letter. The best avian veterinarians in the world can accomplish little without the full cooperation of their clients.
This article was first printed in THE PET BIRD REPORT, Issue #29.
Liz Wilson, Certified Veterinary Technician, has been assisting pet bird owners with parrot behavior problems for over a decade through lectures, phone consultations, and house calls in the Greater Philadelphia area
She can be reached at (215) 946-5964 9AM - 9PM M-F
Copyright Elizabeth H. Wilson, April, 1998.
All rights reserved. Parts or whole may be reprinted, but not distributed without express written permission of the author.
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