shadowtriads:

mexicanjesuschrist:

cricketsgotme:

WHOLESOME POST

good afternoon everyone this post is making the rounds YET AGAIN on my dashboard and as the resident snowy owl keeper i feel compelled to tell y’all AGAIN that this isn’t a video you should be supporting and by supporting it you’re feeding right into the romanticisation of owls to a lesser degree.
(sorry @ who im reblogging this from this isn’t an attack on you ;; )

i’ve worked with and trained a snowy owl from three weeks old to currently two and a half years old. everything i see in this video is screaming out to me that that owl is not happy. i also know this because my mentor and i raised said owl around dogs to get her used to them – the difference is we stepped in immediately when one got to close to her, and sure as hell didn’t film one bothering her nor ever allow them to get their muzzles right in her face.

see, snowy owls are a bit special in that they very rarely nibble or bite to show affection like others owls do. what’s going on here is not even preening behaviour. biting that dog is actually telling it to go away and leave it alone. the fact it’s tilting its head back is also showing a huge amount of discomfort. every time i do something my owl doesn’t like, she will nibble me and sometimes even bite if i piss her off enough, and believe me it HURTS.

second of all, the owl in this video is backing away from the dog. again, this is another defensive behaviour which i’ve seen in fact this past christmas display season when retrieving my owl from her aviary. backing away indicates its looking for an escape and is going to try and fly off in a few seconds to make sure that the thing bothering it defiitely leaves it alone. defensive behaviour isn’t always fluffing up and screeching or whatever. from the way that owl is stretching up towards the end and leaning away, that dog is on its final warning before it snaps and bites properly. and that’s going to hurt that puppy a LOT, if i, a person, can be left with bruises that stick around for weeks from a properly aggressive bite from a snowy owl. (don’t even get me started on the damage their talons can do – people have been left with puncture wounds before now from improper handling. i even wear a glove that has three layers of leather on it and one thinsulate layer inside it and sometimes the force my owl has exerted on my fist has been astoundingly powerful…not to mention the talon marks she’s left when she does decide to grip tightly.)

the cherry on top is that dogs carry bacteria in their saliva which is actually incredibly harmful to birds. here’s the best and clearest article i can currently find  (will replace it as soon as i find the actual article i want) (this does refer to budgies, but it’s still the same in other birds). having that puppy snuffling around in such cloe proximity to its beak is ASKING for trouble and potentially even a dead bird if they’re not careful.

the thing with owning any exotic animal is it’s not just the responsibility of caring for it and everything associated with that, it’s also how you show it to other people. romanticisation of owls through videos such as this is insanely harmful, because there’s already an epidemic, in the UK particularly, of people buying owls and then getting them into horrendous conditions or evenn outright killing them through lack of care and neglect. i have spoken about this at great length previously so please refer to this post and i strongly recommend you read it so i’m not repeating myself. the pictures at the end speak fro themselves about the results of people thinking this and getting an owl as a cool fun pet.

so yeah. be mindful of what you reblog with things like this. i know that it’s pointless now since this has hundreds of thousands of notes, but my point isn’t to try and educate everyone, it’s the few who’ll see this and trickle what i’m saying down, becuase this careless treatment of owls particularly has got to end at some point, and small steps are what counts in the end.

TL;DR owls and dogs don’t mix, stop trying to portray it as cute when circulating things like this is harmful to people who decide to get owls, and more importantly the owls themselves, worldwide