Feather-damaging Behaviour in Companion Parrots: An Initial Analysis of Potential Demographic Risk Factors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Captive parrots (Psittaciformes) commonly engage in “feather-damaging behaviour” (FDB) that suggests compromised welfare. Susceptibilities to FDB have been suggested, but not empirically demonstrated, to vary across the > 200 species kept in captivity. Other demographic risk factors have been proposed for particular species – but neither confirmed nor generalised across Psittaciformes. In this preliminary study, we analysed data from a previously-conducted survey of pet owners: among 538 companion parrots representing 10 non-domesticated, non-hybrid species ( n ≥ 17/species), FDB prevalence was 15.8% overall. We tested whether individual FDB status was predicted by four previously-suggested demographic risk factors: species, sex, age, or hatch origin. Available (limited) data on husbandry were assessed as potential confounding variables and controlled for as appropriate. Species identity was a predictor of FDB status ( P = 0.047), even after controlling for all other variables tested; however, in light of multiple statistical testing, this effect cannot be considered robust until it is replicated. The strongest predictors of FDB status were age ( P = 0.001; with odds of positive FDB status lower in juveniles versus adolescents or adults [ P ≤ 0.036]), and sex ( P = 0.006; with odds of FDB lower in individuals of unknown, versus known, sex [ P ≤ 0.037]). These findings need to be replicated with data that allow better statistical controls for systematic differences in housing. However, they do provide preliminary empirical evidence for within-species risk factors (suggesting new, testable hypotheses about the etiology of parrot FDB); and for intrinsic, cross-species differences in FDB susceptibility (providing a rationale for future study of the biological factors that might underpin any such taxonomic differences).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".