The public is, sadly, all too familiar with images and stories of puppy and kitten mills, where animals are bred under terrible conditions, usually for sale to pet stores. What many people don’t know is that the feathered equivalent exists.
A parrot mill is a heartrending sight. Bonded pairs of parrots are kept in constant breeding conditions in small, dirty cages. Eggs are removed immediately and placed in incubators, and the parrots are forced to breed again (a situation that places emotional stress on both birds and great physical stress on the hen). Most breeders in bird mills never see their chicks hatch.
Death rates are high in bird mills, if only because the mill has too many parrots for staff to maintain. Disease outbreaks are common, including such dangerous diseases as PBFD (pisttacine beak and feather disease), parrot fever and polyoma. Diseased birds may be shipped out to pet stores, increasing the risk of further infection.
Feather Mutilation and Psychological Trauma
In order to facilitate maximum breeding, parrot mills provide birds with few avenues for stimulation. Parrots need toys to explore, preen and destroy. Alone in empty cages, breeding pairs are likely to develop serious psychological conditions, including repetitive behavior and feather mutilation. While parrots often mate for life, the combination of stress and boredom in a bird mill can lead to one bird injuring or killing the other.
Baby birds are also damaged by a bird mill’s brand of animal abuse. A well-adjusted and tame baby parrot has been handled by humans from birth and trusts them. The bird may be hand fed, or fed by the parent parrots and merely handled by the breeder. In a parrot mill, babies are fed en masse using syringes. Careless feeding of baby parrots can damage or kill the bird. Parrot mill breeding stock rarely live to old age.
Few baby parrots born in bird mills are properly weaned when they are sold to new owners or pert stores. Weaning a parrot requires special care and patience—two traits notably lacking in the average bird mill.
From Bird Mills to Parrot Rescues
Parrots, in order to be happy and tame around humans, need to be socialized with both humans and their own kind. Without early socialization a parrot often matures into a nervous, destructive bird. Such birds are more likely to scream uncontrollably, feather pluck, or bite.
Biting, screaming birds are most likely to be abandoned, as are plucked parrots that no longer look like the beautiful bird their owners bought. As a result, many bird mill parrots move from breeding mill to pet store, from pet store to owner, and then from owner to owner. The lucky ones eventually are surrendered to parrot rescues or bird sanctuaries. Others fall victim to animal abuse along the way.
Avoiding Bird Mills
Taking action against bird mills can be difficult. As a general rule birds have less protection than other pets, although parrot mills have been successfully shut down on animal abuse charges.
The scale of a breeding facility doesn’t make it a parrot mill—how the birds are treated determines whether or not an establishment is a bird mill. While many parrot mills are large-scale commercial affairs, there are also small scale breeders who run small bird mills and large scale commercial breeders who truly care for their birds.
Avoiding buying birds from parrot mills is essential, as cash is the bottom line for mill owners. This includes refusing to do business with pet stores that buy birds from parrot owners. If you are interested in parrots, take the time to find a good parrot breeder, or consider giving one of the many birds surrendered to parrot rescues a home.
