By Ann Castro

Scarlett is an eight year old female greenwing macaw. Like many parrots in captivity, she suffers from chronic aspergillosis, a fungal infection of the lungs. Whilst she is being treated with conventional medicines, it is a chronic disease that is unlikely to be cured completely with conventional medicine. All one can do is to attempt to manage the disease.

One of the dangers of aspergillosis is an acute breathing problem attack. These are due to parts of the fungal growth loosening and lodging in the breathing system. A bird with such an acute breathing attack may well die from it by suffocation. A remedy is cortisone, but as this damages the bird;s adrenal glands and may be lethal in the longer term, this is only a measure of last resort. Thus, it should be avoided, if at all possible.

Scarlett was having an acute breathing attack gasping for air. She is quite tame, but like many parrots, she can be rather selective as to how and when she would like to be petted. Nevertheless, on a hunch, I decided to tap on her directly and not to use surrogate tapping. Now, a bird's anatomy is quite different from a human's, so it is difficult to transfer the exact tapping points and spots for the set-up phrase from a human chart. Therefore, some experimentation is called for when working with parrots.

I started by tapping on the top of Scarlett's head with the set-up phrase:

Although (Even though) I am having these breathing problems, I am a great bird.

The top of the head was chosen for accessibility and safety reasons. A distressed bird may bite and inflict a lot of damage. While tapping with one hand on the top of her head, I could gently anchor her beak in the other hand. For those who are not familiar with Greenwing Macaws, Scarlett is able take my wrist into her beak. The beak is powerful enough to crack Macadamia nuts. If she should decide she did not like what I was doing, it would not just be painful, but she could inflict a lot of damage to my hand. Thus, I preferred to be cautious.

After tapping the set-up phrase, I tapped around her eyes and the top of the upper beak while saying "breathing problems." Performing this procedure three times took mere seconds.

As she was visibly relaxing, I decided to try some of Scarlett's spots where she doesn't like to be touched because they correspond more closely to what would be the set-up and tapping points in humans. I thought it worthwhile to try this, because I have experienced with some of my other parrots, that birds who do not usually like to be petted, love to be tapped. Maybe they feel that it helps them or at least, they are noticing my good intent.

So next I rubbed Scarlett's pectoral muscles to the right and left of the top of her keel bone in the spot that would be in approximately the same location as the sore spot in humans:

Although (Even though) I still have some breathing problems, I am a really good bird .

Scarlett usually does not like to be touched, let alone rubbed on her chest, but this time she did not mind. Meanwhile I was cautious because this location put my hand in a very vulnerable spot right next to her powerful beak. But, she had no problem whatsoever with me doing the set-up phrase, thus.

Seeing this, I got a little more daring and on the next round I tapped her head, the eye spots and upper beak, as well as under her beak, along her keel bone and even her feet.

It worked marvelously. In less than ten minutes her breathing was back to normal. Compare this to previous occasions where, without EFT, I was sitting for hours with her fighting for her breath.

Scarlett and I are sending a big thank you for EFT.

Best regards,

Ann