Self-Cleaning Oven Fumes Kill Birds, Despite Heeding Warnings

SIOUX FALLS, SD — Jana Keller learned tragically just how toxic fumes from a self-cleaning oven can be to pets. She knew the danger and took all the proper precautions, written in the fine print of the oven user manual, when she turned her oven on the self-cleaning feature: She opened windows, she turned on the ceiling fan and flipped the switch on the exhaust fan.

She even moved her three pet diamond doves to an aviary in the living room, as advised in the manual, and closed the sliding doors separating it and the kitchen.

But it wasn’t enough, Keller wrote in a mournful, apologetic Facebook post. It was embarrassing to admit, she said, but she killed her birds.

The birds succumbed quickly. By the time she noticed something was wrong, one of the birds had already died and the next expired within minutes. The mother bird appeared to be OK.

“We immediately removed her from our home and sat with her in a warm car,” Keller wrote. “It was no use. It was too late, she died within twenty minutes.”

Keller has kept her oven clean during 43 years of owning birds — canaries and parakeets, exotic finches and doves — but never with such tragic results. She wanted a clean, fresh oven for baking Christmas goodies, but didn’t imagine she would lose her companions as a result. She wrote that she put her embarrassment aside to spare others the pain of having a pet bird die.

She questions whether the small warning in the user manual is sufficient. “The health of some birds is extremely sensitive to the fumes given off during the self-cleaning cycle of any range,” the warning stated. “Move birds to another well-ventilated area.”

She encouraged her small circle of Facebook friends to share her post “so that other pet birds don’t die in vain.”

“If I, a lifelong pet bird owner can have this happen, how many other people have lost their pet birds to toxic fumes?” she wrote.

The birds’ death opened a host of questions in Keller’s mind, including this perplexing one: “What’s more, if those fumes are fatal enough to kill birds, what does it do to humans, especially our children?”

The “modern convenience” of a self-cleaning oven isn’t worth the price she paid, Keller wrote, noting, that she’d “rather have spent hours and lots of elbow grease cleaning my oven the old-fashioned way.”

It’s not enough to move birds to another room when using the self-cleaning feature.

“I did and my birds are dead,” she wrote, then added in all capital letters: “MOVE YOUR BIRDS ENTIRELY OUT OF YOUR HOME!!”

“Today,” she wrote on the Nov. 29 Facebook post that showed her three doves — DreeDree and Warren, a bonding pair, and their offspring, Button — “there is an eerie silence and emptiness in my home. … Forgive me, little ones. I’m so, so sorry.”

The post was shared more than 59,300 times and received 44,000 positive interactions. In a follow-up post, Keller said it was comforting to know that sharing her story may have prevented a similar tragedy for another bird lover.

File photo: Steve Smith/Mood Board/Shutterstock