This weekend just gone we spent most of the day on Sunday moving around, cleaning out, and rebuilding the kids bedrooms, this involved sorting the girls and boys into seperate bedrooms, building a set of bunk beds Paula picked up on Saturday, moving and fixing the wardrobe the monkey boys seem to have taken pleasure in hanging from like erm monkeys, and dust …. I mean DUST … I’ve never seen so much dust in my life, this sparked off the idea about this post, when I was hoovering the dust up my question to Paula was “what’s dustier? our kids or the african greys?”
I’m pretty hyper sensitive to dust as I suffer from asthma, particularly in the summer when the pollen count is high, living in the middle of a bunch of fields usually packed with some sort of crop, corn, barley and most dreaded for me rape seed oil doesn’t help it much either, so this is only amplified more when we have a load of greys in the house.
African greys are notoriously known for being dusty pets, so for those like me that have breathing disorders, disfunction, issues whatever you like to call them I guess owning an African grey parrot isn’t the best idea.
Saying that though my mother-in-law has severe breathing problems with chronic lung disease and she’s owned an African grey parrot for YEARS, for as long as I’ve known her and more, while she does suffer more on some days than others she is able to tolerate the dust enough to own a grey.
So those of you wondering if it’s a bad idea or not to own an African grey because of the dust problem there’s a little ray of hope, I would say if you were looking to own more than one grey then that really is a bad idea, you will really suffer without doubt.
Some tips I’ve learnt to help me tolerate the problems of breathing in the dust of our greys are:
1. Make sure that I don’t sit or spend long periods of time sitting next to where the greys cage or stand is, they tend to shake, scratch and ruffle their dust everywhere and being so close to the source means I am highly likely to breathe more of it in … watching the dust come off them in the rays of sunshine through the window really astounds me at how me at how much there is.
2. Make sure you hoover and dust every day, if you don’t you’ll know about it, Paula chases the kids around all day with the hoover and me when I get home from work so our place is always pretty dust free considering the parrots in the house (we’re down to two as of writing this).
3. This one requires some initital cost and running fees, go and buy an air purifier (something like this) which is pretty effective, we even use one of these in the breeding shed to keep the air clean (ironic isn’t it), the only thing to note is you need to clean the air filter quite frequently, as you can imagine it gets pretty dusty and clogged up.
Anyway to get back to my original question … what’s dustier the kids or the parrots, well … after seeing the amount of dust in their rooms this weekend I think it’s too close to call … sorry kids!!!
