do you mayhaps think that some of these species are endangered because of trafficking for the pet trade
some people’s exotic pets do definitely need to be set free. Some cannot be. My parrot was taken from the amazon as a hatchling. He spent 4 years in a tiny cage and getting abused before he came to my family and we rescued him. We then had him for 32 years. He was unable to fly. He loved cuddling. He was anxious. He could not have gone back to the Amazon. Sometimes rescued pets are exotic, not for the thrill of having an exotic pet but because other people mistreat exotics and someone’s gotta help them. If, on the other hand, you can rear the animal in preparation to be re-released or if you get the animal in adulthood, bringing it back to its natural habitat is a good idea.
do you think that perhaps the reason your parrot was poached from the wild and abused for years is because there’s a demand for them here as pets, and if we stopped the idea of parrots being housepets none of that cruelty would have come upon him
Love this. Fighting the exotic pet trade and all its horrible side effects starts with education and reducing demand for them.
Obviously exotics that have been in the care of humans since babies can’t ever be released because they could spread disease/don’t know how to exist as a wild animal but we should just like… not take any more from the wild? Is this a difficult concept for most people?
‘most people’ doing the actual poaching are poor people in developing countries just trying to make a living. they harvest birds they can sell to traffickers because they know people both locally and internationally will buy them. when the traffickers cannot find any customers aka profit, they will stop trafficking them. and if the poachers had a reliable income and stable economy and not being exploited by corporations, they would have no reason to poach. its business.
The wildlife trade can be seen as a multi-level chain that typically involves poachers,
middlemen, processing centers, and markets. It appears that much of wildlife poaching is
committed opportunistically by peasants rather than professional poachers or members of
organized crime. This can not only be seen with parrot poaching in neo-tropical
countries (Pires and Clarke, 2011; 2012), but also with turtles, tortoises, sea horses, and
reptiles in East Asia (TRAFFIC, 2008); with bush meat in Africa (Roe 2008); with cacti
in North America (Robbins and Barcenas, 2003); and in many cases, overfishing (Putt
and Nelson 2008; EJF, 2007). Although there are exceptions to this rule, namely tiger
poaching and some proportion of abalone and sturgeon poaching (TRAFFIC, 2008;
Vaisman, 1997; Tayler, 2001; Saffron, 2002; Carey, 2005; Hauck and Sweijd, 1999;
Hauck and Kroese, 2006; Putt and Nelson, 2008; White, 2008), the accumulated evidence
thus far points to local villagers as the largest contributor to poaching wildlife around the
world. Once poaching occurs, depending on the region and species involved, the
subsequent stages in the wildlife trade tend to be more organized, especially when
smuggling wildlife across national borders
THE ILLEGAL PARROT TRADE IN THE NEO-TROPICS:
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POACHING AND ILLICIT PET MARKETS
By Stephen Ferreira Pires
please consider rescuing a bird instead of buying one. parrots really shouldn’t be pets in the first place; but since they are, and there doesn’t seem to be any signs of it stopping, take the best care of them that you can, do your research, and make sure you aren’t supporting illegally imported birds.
today's bird 