DweezelJazz Art Blog » perfumes

Jasmine’s Story

DweezelJazz — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:40:44 +0000

Jazzy holding apple and posing for photo

Jasmine is an african grey parrot. She lived with us for 18 months. We met her in the pet section of a garden center, where she had been for over 6 months. My husband was looking for pots for his cacti. We ended up going to the garden center several times over a time period of about a month. While Tony was looking for pots I wandered into the pet section and saw Jazzy. Every time we went to the center I went to say hello to her and we ended up friends. She loved having her head scratched and whistled after me if I walked away from her cage. It didn’t take long before I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and of course the inevitable happened: we invited her to live with us.

She was scared of almost everything when she first came to live with us. She scratched all the time behind her neck and her feathers were very sparse in that region. She didn’t want any hand contact and absolutely didn’t want to come out of her cage. Gradually over the next weeks, by giving her loads of attention and treating her with a lot of respect, she relaxed. She turned out to be a very brave, incredibly sweet and extremely adventurous, outgoing character with tremendous intelligence.

Jasmine

Living with Jasmine was a real privilege. She taught us much more the meaning of respect and the art of communication. But most of all she showed us how to live each moment for itself, enjoying life to the full (and banana) and how to give a great deal of love. You can read about her antics and adventures in the posts shown below.

Jazzy Antics

Jazzy continued to scratch behind her neck, but she improved greatly during the first 6 months or so that she lived with us. She gained weight, her feathers turned glossy, she became well-muscled from flying around the house, the pink colors in her tummy feathers became brighter and the red in her tail became brilliant.

Jasmine Flying

We lived in an apartment and circumstances around us changed over time. Laundry detergents and fabric softeners have become increasingly perfumed, more antibacterial products are being used everywhere and in higher concentrations. Our apartment shared airflow with at least 8-15 other apartments, and these cleaning products became mixed creating even further toxic substances. Birds are much more sensitive to perfumes, cleaning agents and pollution.

Jazzy was already very compromised when we got her from the garden center, where they admitted using very strong chemicals to clean the other animal’s living quarters. She was placed close to very strong insecticides that were displayed for sale and many of the visitors to the center wear strong perfumes.

When the air quality in our apartment noticeably became worse, Jasmine started to scratch much more frequently. We bought 5 large air filters and a smaller more portable one that could be lifted off the ground. Jasmine improved dramatically when we got these.

During the summer, the problem became even worse as fumes came out of other people’s apartment windows and directly into our apartment. The shared hallway stairs were cleaned three times a week with highly concentrated perfumed antibacterial detergent; the stairwell had no proper ventilation because the windows were kept closed. We wanted to move, but were financially committed to staying where we were at the time.

Jazzy on an outing in her backpack cage

Jazzy and I spent the entire summer up in the Jura foothills. She had a backpack cage and we walked miles and miles last summer so that she would get fresh air as much as possible. As the summer progressed, Jazzy grew worse and worse with scratching, until finally she started to pull out feathers and then eventually create sores on her skin with scratching.

We did all sorts of things to try to help Jasmine. She was taking medication during the last part of summer to help with the irritation. She had a full check-up and blood work and the results showed her to be a very healthy, fit young girl. The vet was quite clear that she was allergic to perfumes and cleaning agents.

We finally managed to find a place that would provide a better environment and we moved in during the last few days of September 2008. By this time it was practically impossible to distract from her scratching and picking, and the only relief we could give her was in the shower. Her skin was raw and extremely sore. She was in a lot of pain and her misery during the last couple of days she was alive prevented her from enjoying life.

It’s a very long rehabilitation for a bird who has picked its feathers and skin to that extent. The standard practice is to give the bird medicine and put a neck collar on so that the bird can’t pick. This is like putting a human in a straight jacket. And if the skin still itches, the torment would remain, even if the bird couldn’t reach those places to scratch. This discomfort would be reasonable in order to get past the feather picking, but unless the source of the problem could also be removed the scratching and feather pulling would simply resume.

Our new residence is a huge improvement in air quality from where we were, but we still connect to other living spaces in a converted farmhouse. There is a laundry room in the basement with washing machines and a dryer. The dryer releases incredibly strong fumes of fabric softener and perfumes from the laundry detergent; unfortunately these come up through our shared vents and our front door opens into a set of outdoor stairs that lead down to the laundry room. As it turns out we couldn’t have provided Jazzy with a safe living space even here.

We considered giving her to someone else, but we don’t know anyone who doesn’t use perfumes and standard cleaning agents. We tried to arrange for her to go to the United States to a friend who we knew would take care of her, but she didn’t have the correct CITES papers, and the U.S. is not accepting birds from our area of France because of the implications of bird flu. Even if we could have arranged a room in isolation with a good environment for Jazzy with someone else – well, Jazzy was all about interaction, that was life to her. She loved people and she loved being with them. To isolate her would have been cruel.

Jazzy and Tony chatting

Enjoying life was what Jazzy was all about, and we couldn’t bear to watch her suffer. When she deteriorated so much that it was clear she was suffering more than she was enjoying, we decided to let her go free. It hurt, and still hurts, more than anything else in life has ever hurt, but now she flies free.

Jazzy

She’s still a very important part of our lives; we talk about her every day, she’s part of our banter, we’re always including snippets of things the way she said them. She still makes us laugh and smile.

I tell her story here so that those who have parrots can perhaps be more aware of possible causes if their parrot displays scratching, feather picking or even loud irritable behavior. Birds are smaller, and therefore much more sensitive than we are to these things, but we too are affected by them, and it’s worth assessing what products are routinely used in the home and the effects they may have on ourselves and those we love.

Jasmine

Jasmine would have been three years old in November. She passed away on October 3rd, 2008. Her life was packed with fun and joy, though she should have lived to be somewhere between 60 to a 100 years old.

Jazzy on top of her cage

She spread a lot of joy to those she met, and she met loads of people during her short life. I hope that her story can be told as much as possible so that it may spread more goodness in a world that really needs it.

Jasmine was, and still is, mascot to DweezelJazz Art.

To read and see loads of photos about her and her adventures, click on the links below:

If you prefer to see all of the above posts on the same page, click the following link. The articles appear on the page in reverse time order, as is usual for blogs:

All of Jasmine’s Adventures (ie. all of the above posts displayed on one page in reverse order)

Breathing One Breath At A Time

DweezelJazz — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:00:00 +0000

I’m aware of almost every breath I take – and that’s because most of the time it hurts to breathe. This discomfort increases or lessens with variations in the air quality in my environment. There are some positive aspects to this: I’m great to have around as an air quality monitor. Unfortunately there are rather too many inconveniences that arise from this situation to balance out the positive, and no one has yet offered me a job as an air quality meter!Our town is expanding in size at a phenomenal rate, perhaps doubling or tripling in the number of apartment buildings in just the last year alone. In a two-block radius from where we live the number of cranes that can be seen actively involved in constructing new apartments is astonishing. Rapid expansion is the norm almost everywhere today, bringing with it increased activity of all types.Traffic locally has increased dramatically as the number of households increases. And there are more cars per household because more people need to go to work to sustain the family unit in the face of increased cost of living. Our apartment block car-park is now filled to overflowing, whereas a year ago spaces were easily found at all times.We live a block away from a large school which is at the end of a dead end road. Four times a day school buses and long lines of cars wait in line to drop children off at the school and then turn around and wait in line to exit the cul-de-sac. Diesel fumes in our neighborhood continue to rise.Many people still choose to burn their garden refuse outside in small or large bonfires, rather than take it to the dump where it can often be disposed of in a more environmentally friendly manner. The result is that most days, usually for an hour or so, the strong acrid smell of smoke and particles of ash drifts by our apartment building.The sky blue becomes remote and is filled instead with a brown-orange haze. Trees become less distinct, blurred by haze of pollution. Reflections no longer show bright and dazzling, instead they glow dull yellow.When the rain and wind comes it clears the air and the sparkling brilliance and wonder of our earth is clear to see again. But with each passing year, the length of time this lasts after a rainfall is becoming less before it builds up and becomes murky from our activities again.With every breath I take I’m aware of this progression, acutely aware because I’m forced to notice it. As a kid I traveled with my family to many places, experienced many different environmental conditions and inadvertently was exposed to a good number of toxic substances – things that are now coming to be recognized as problematic to the health.The prolific number of articles being published these days about all kinds of substances used in products that are now being discovered to be harmful to our health is hard to miss. Here’s a few about pollution:1. “Pneumonia ‘linked’ to Pollution” BBC News, April 14, 2008. Professor George Knox, of the University of Birmingham, wrote in a research report that there were high mortality rates observed in areas with elevated ambient pollution levels. The strongest single effect was an increase in pneumonia deaths, but there were also higher rates of some cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and rheumatic heart disease. Richard Hubbard of the British Lung Foundation said: “What this paper does show, is that there is clear geographical variation in deaths from pneumonia, lung cancer and COPD.”2. “Pollution ‘alters brain function’” BBC News, March 11, 2008. A team at Zuyd University in the Netherlands studied the effects of diesel exhaust on humans. They found that after about 30 minutes exposure to diesel fumes the brain displayed (via EEG readings, electrical signals of the brain) a stress response that indicates a change in the way information is being processed in the brain cortex. This effect continued after the people were removed from exposure to the diesel fumes.The lead researcher, Paul Borm, said “We can only speculate what these effects may mean for the chronic exposure to air pollution encountered in busy cities where the levels of such soot particles can be very high.”The article ends with this startling statement: “But a study of dogs in Mexico found those who lived in highly-polluted Mexico City had brain lesions similar to those seen in Alzheimer’s patients, while those who lived in much less-polluted rural areas showed a much lower rate of damage to the brain.”3. “Smog Can Make People Sick, Even Indoors” Scientific American, January 29, 2008. Environmental health scientist Michael Apte of Lawrance Berkeley National Laboratory in California said: “We found that outdoor air pollution, ozone, is associated with symptoms of lower-respiratory and upper-respiratory stress that occur in buildings to workers.” Ozone is an air-polluting oxygen molecule O3 which is formed when sunlight interacts with car exhaust.The article explains: “Sick building syndrome is a term used to describe a broad range of ailments, including dry eye, congestion, difficulty breathing, fatigue and headaches that strike workers inside office buildings but disappear when they leave the premises.”The results from a study of indoor air quality data from 1994-1998 and a survey of office workers in 100 buildings in 37 cities (ranging from the most smog to the cleanest) showed that of the workers surveyed on average, even in buildings with no special history of sickness:nearly 19% complained of dry eye21% felt congested on the job4% complained of difficulty breathingmore than 19% felt fatiguedmore than 15% reported having headaches while at work.These figures are astounding and illustrate the damage occurring to many people in our society. In this article Michael Apte speculates that the symptoms experienced by people are due to unstable ozone molecules chemically interacting with the wide range of materials found in buildings. Ozone reacts with all types of materials from polyester, plastics, carpet fibres, the skin’s natural oil, and many more, to produce toxic chemicals like formaldehyde and other irritants that are far worse than the ozone itself.The article continues: “In other words, ozone seeping into buildings combines with other chemicals to produce more noxious air.”In addition to the outside air becoming more polluted with traffic, smoke, pesticides and many other substances, the general population is using more and more household chemicals in increasingly higher concentrations.As it’s getting warmer with summer approaching it’s becoming tremendously difficult to effectively keep higher concentrations of household chemicals out of our apartment. If our neighbors have their laundry drying on their balconies (and this is a daily common occurrence) then I cannot open our balcony windows without experiencing great difficulty and discomfort breathing due to the laundry detergent and fabric softener chemicals exuding from the clothes.If our neighbors have their windows open, the strong chemical fumes of laundry detergent with fabric softeners, household cleaning agents and personal grooming products such as perfume are so strong that it’s necessary to close the windows to prevent the strong mixture from swamping our apartment.The following article about the “Health Risks of Fabric Softeners” on the Allergy and Environmental Health Association web site has some disturbing information. They state that fabric softener is the most toxic product sold for daily household use and give the following information about it:”…a user becomes ‘chronically maladapted’ to it. The exposure is so constant that it can be difficult to connect the product with the signs of reactivity it causes. Neurostimulant / irritants and central nervous system toxins used in these products are known to produce an addictive-type response that may cause the user to experience a feeling of pleasure when the product is directly inhaled. Regular users of fabric softeners (and perfumes) also often claim they ‘can hardly smell it’. This too is an effect of chemical ingredients on neural receptors.”"The product is designed to impregnate fibers and slowly re-release for an extended period of time. That re-releasing affects the health not only of users, but those around them.”On the subject of “Risks of Perfumes and Scented Products” it continues: “The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) collected samples of every perfume sold in North America in 1993. Every sample contained toluene…”. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health lists toluene in their Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards, and the link can be followed to see this in more detail.There is a list of some of the chemical ingredients found in fabric softeners and of the disorders each of these substances is known to cause. The list is worth reading.When we first moved into this apartment building just over a year ago the stairwell was cleaned once a week with a relatively mild-scented cleaning detergent. The cleaning detergent has been changed to a more highly scented product which smells very much like the antibacterial strongly scented products that are routinely used in toilets. The stairwell is now cleaned 3 or 4 times a week with an increasingly more concentrated solution of this product.It’s becoming impossible to prevent large amounts of household cleaning chemicals from entering our apartment airflow. Even with large air filters working 24 hours a day the adverse effects are becoming worse and I’m becoming increasingly unable to function in this environment. When driving or walking in the vicinity of our apartments it’s possible to smell that the area is encompassed by a cloud of chemicals.As soon as I leave the area and enter the clean air of the foothills 20 minutes’ walk behind where we live my breathing returns to normal and after a while I no longer feel lung pain. When I return to places where there are houses or apartment buildings, the fumes emanating from them cause a return of the burning pain in the lungs. Our apartment building is no exception to the norm, even passing cars leave a trail of scent from perfumes and scented products of their owners behind them.As the intensity of the chemicals increases with the oncoming summer heat, I’m becoming more and more unwell at home. I’ll have to spend much of my day outside in the cleaner air in the hills away from my home in order to reduce my exposures to these chemicals, to avoid becoming ill all the time and to try to prevent becoming even more sensitive to them.If I’m not at home I can’t paint egg tempera paintings as a full-time occupation. I had been hoping to create enough paintings to set up for an exhibition, and in time, earn enough money to be able to afford to live in a small house where I wouldn’t be at the mercy of others’ choices in cleaning habits.It’s frustrating beyond expression to be perfectly well in clean fresh air, but to essentially find myself poisoned in my home environment. I was hoping to get ahead with the artwork before our environment became prohibitive to my ability to function. I haven’t given up, but it’s becoming more and more difficult.I wish, by sharing this information, that maybe more people can perhaps benefit from my experience and avoid having to reach this point. Even eliminating a few of these products from our daily lives can make a huge difference in how energetic and good we feel.The cumulative impact of our choices can have a very high price in the future quality of our lives and those of our children. I wonder what it will take for us as a society to really understand the extent of the damage we’re inflicting on ourselves and the wildlife around us. If you’d like to see more on chemical sensitivity, pollution, cleaning agents and the effects they’re having, click here to see previous DweezelJazz posts on these topics.

Jasmine And Her Tousle With Poor Air Quality

DweezelJazz — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Jasmine loves to take showers these days. She goes into the bathroom and takes a proper shower, and if she doesn’t get a chance to do that, she splashes in her water bowl. Here she is with her tummy still wet from having taken a shower earlier in the morning.She likes to hang out on her play station and play with her toys.Well, she does for a short while and then she starts flying……from chair to chair (and even to lamps, even though lamps aren’t ‘allowed’).But she never stays in one place for long…Back to the play station…On to the top of the air filter (this too is forbidden territory because she could reach the electrical cable and chomp on it – not a good idea!)The air filter has always been placed three or four feet from Jazzy’s cage and we thought this should work for the entire room.But we live in an apartment block near a major road and the air quality is often poor. Neighbors use strong cleaning agents, laundry detergents and fabric softeners so that regularly throughout the day some chemical agent enters the apartment. Pesticides are used on the nearby fields to safeguard the crops. There are also at least three building sites for new apartment building complexes within one to two blocks of our place. Several times a day there is a constant stream of cars and buses going to and from the school at the end of our road. To sum it all up: that’s a fair amount of pollution.African Greys are known to have allergies and be sensitive to air quality. Jazzy already had allergies before she came to live with us. She scratches at the back of her neck, and I’ve noticed that this regularly coincides with when I’m experiencing difficulties with the air myself.Recently Jazzy had become constantly very very loud and even aggressive. She has also been scratching tonnes more and, as a result, has lost even more of the little feathers on her neck, leaving soft down exposed. No matter how many toys I gave her or how much I tried to entertain her it didn’t solve her dissatisfaction.The air quality around here has become noticeably worse in the last month or so and in desperation, after weeks of enduring Jazzy’s very loud and poor behavior, I put the air filter a foot away from her cage and pointed the vents under it. It’s absolutely incredible how changed she is since then: she’s extremely gentle, she chats but doesn’t heckle, she’s playing with her toys like never before. Her aggression is totally gone. She’s bright and sparky again – a happy bird!With such a dramatic change in her behavior from being so consistently difficult to transforming into just about angelic with the filter close to her, I wonder how many other pet birds there are who are having difficulties with the air quality around them? For more information about the air filter see previous post: “Air Filters For Asthma, Allergies and Chemical Sensitivity”. I’m so pleased to see her happy again. She plays with her beads……chomps on her straw toys……stops to take a breather……and of course, does silly things for fun and to make us all laugh.