Metal toys

[Hypnotoad72]

At Petco, they have these cool metal toys, made out of aluminum, and have coiled rubber, plastic, and cuttlebone bits added.

A couple of these pieces appear to have been welded with solder. (Solder is, of course, lead.)

I know Scooter loves shiny things, and the soldered area is very small (2mm), but my gut tells me he'll go right for the soldered area because it looks different and spend hours licking and chewing on it, rather than the excess centimeters of safe aluminum areas.

I forgot the proper name, but two of their model names are 'Tornado' and 'Typhoon'.

While I'd love to give a safe metal toy for Scooter to play with, I have my reservations.

Would you even begin to consider one of those toys?

[phonelady61]

no I would not because of exactly what you said soldered area . that can be loaded with metal toxicity and would not even risk it . Move on and find him safer toys . I always aire more on the side of caution than I do anything else when it comes to my birds . better safe than sorry and a dead bird .

[wildirish]

If it is like this one, they are bird safe metals, however we had one and our CAG Sophie got her wing stuck sideways in between the spiral part, we almost couldn't gether lose. I have never bought another one!

[Chief's Mom]

I had that same toy for my sun conure, and he loved the metal. But the same thing happened to him. He managed to get tangled in the spirals. Because he loved the metal parts, I took the plastic spirals off, and we never had a problem again.

[wildirish]

That is what we did, we took the "wind chime" part off and let her have the rest. She managed to do this twice, DH thought he pushed the spirals together enough to prevent it and he was wrong! So no more spirals!

[Hypnotoad72]

Originally Posted by wildirish

If it is like this one, they are bird safe metals, however we had one and our CAG Sophie got her wing stuck sideways in between the spiral part, we almost couldn't gether lose. I have never bought another one!

Yup, that's the one! I know Scooter would dig it, but one of the connecting metal rings was soldered in the middle and it creeped me out.

And thx for the warning about what might happen; I will keep that in mind!

[Freedomoflight]

I've never much liked the look of the toys- the ones I've always seen in person have sharp edges that I can't imagine would be safe.

[sootykitty]

Does anyone know of a simple test to do that will tell you what type of metal is in a toy? Is it only Zinc that we need to worry about, or are there other metals that are toxic?