Giving Eye Drops to Bird
Hello!! I help care for a 43 year old amazon parrot. One of his eye’s started getting cloudy and he was holding it shut so we took him to the vet. They said it was calcium deposits from old age (his bloodwork was fine), that there wasn’t much we can do to stop them, and gave us eye drops to give to him 3 times a day. Problem is, he hates them. The vet said we need to drop it onto his open eye and not just on his eyelid. So it typically involves restraining him while he screeches, opening his eyelid, and dropping the drops in. After doing this thrice daily for a while, his trust in people had been completely destroyed. He no longer wanted to interact with anyone, and stopped really singing, preening, and doing much of anything. If you approached him he would open up his wings and backs away as fast as possible and look terrified. So now his only interaction with us was the eye drops that he hates. We felt that he was so stressed that we stopped giving the drops to him for a bit to let him recover. Slowly he has but can still be wary of us and only now selectively lets us interact with him. Now we want to continue the drops but are hoping to think of a new approach that might be less stressful for him. Has anyone had to do anything like this with their parrot? I’m also curious if anyone has had a bird with these calcium deposits and what it was like, because I can only seem to find pretty basic information on it.
TLDR: We have to give a 43 year old amazon parrot eye drops 3 times a day. He has become traumatized by the eye-drop giving process (restraining him and holding his eye open). We are hoping for any ideas on how to make this less traumatizing for him.