by Pajarita » Thu Dec 03, 2020 11:50 am
Of course there are breeders that are better than others! That's a given! But a responsible person who decides to breed an animal because it loves it would study about that species BEFORE breeding it - and anybody who has studied and loves parrots knows that normal people cannot give them a good life as a pet so we end up with a conundrum, don't we? How can somebody who loves parrots and knows their needs justify breeding them for the pet trade knowing that it's impossible for any normal person to give those babies a good life?
And although I think it is wonderfully decent of you to believe that one should only condemn individual actions or individuals and not entire industries, it is a bit too idealistic for practicality, isn't it? I mean, we condemn industries all the time to the point of making them illegal or, at the very least, fighting to make them illegal: dog fighting, trophy hunting, crush videos, drug trafficking, money counterfeiting, credit card fraud, hacking, child pornography... and I could go on and on. I am also afraid that, to a breeder -any breeder- a baby bird IS a product (anything 'produced' for sale is, by definition, a 'product') and, as much as I would love to say: "From your lips to God's ears!", bad bird breeders will not go out of business for the simple reason that people who buy their baby birds from them are almost always not even aware of what constitutes good care so they couldn't possibly tell who is the better breeder even if they had more than one or two to compare. There might be some people who takes its time and looks for the better breeder but 99.9999% of people simply buy a baby bird from the first breeder or petstore they come across. And the breeder and the pet store employee will tell them that they LOVE birds with a passion, that they take real good care of them, that they are not 'in it' for the money, etc. etc. - every single time! Why? Because it's good business! I mean, who would buy a baby bird from a breeder that admits to not caring or a store that admits buying it from bird mill? Nobody, that's who! Of course the fact that they are selling the baby to whoever has the money and not giving them away for free to qualified homes is a dead give-away of what exactly their bottom line is but most people WANT to believe the good in other people so, even when they are very intelligent, they did their research and might have their suspicions, they choose to believe them and they still buy the baby. And I am going to go even further and tell you something else: sometimes, even when people see that the seller/breeder is a bad person or the store a bad place, they will still buy the baby because they see it as a 'rescue'. A couple of months ago I gave a kitten (for free, mind you, I do not charge a penny for any animal that I rehome) to a lady who admitted paying $150 for a kitten to a woman who had taken a litter of a feral mother, put them in a cage and sold them in CL. The lady knew she was actually encouraging this bad woman to continue doing this but she couldn't walk away and leave without taking at least one kitten off her hands. When it comes to animal suffering, good people would, sometimes, do the wrong thing for the right reason and this is why certain industries need to be made illegal or, at the very least, condemned.
Again, I am not against keeping parrots as pets - they are here and somebody has to love them and take good care of them. But buying a baby is a completely different story... and soooooo very unnecessary when there are so many fabulous birds waiting for a home in rescues or being offered all the time in CL, rescueme, kijiji, etc. Why pay good money to a person who regards the animal as a product when you can pay less money to an animal lover who put time, effort and even money out of their own pocket into rehabilitating/vetting/caring for the animal?