atvchick95
Biking along the boulevard
With respect to the recurring theme of adoption costs:
When you buy a baby bird from a breeder, what costs has the breeder incurred with respect to the bird?
Now, when you adopt a bird from rescue, what costs has the rescue incurred? Keep in mind that many of the birds they have have come from abuse/neglect situations, some have come to them with significant health issues, and almost all of them have been housed and cared for by the rescue for much longer than a breeder has a baby or young bird.
Yes, you may be adopting a bird that has had none of those costs associated with it, but the adoption fee you are paying is helping to defray the expenses of the bird who needs $3,000 worth of vet care.
It seems to me that we human beings want what we want, and in pursuit of what we want, we treat the living beings we profess to love like any other commodity, to be bought and sold. We may love the bird (or cat or dog) whom we have purchased, just as we purchase a car that we *love*, but IMO, we can’t honestly say that we *love* birds (or cats or dogs or other animals) in general as long as we’re pursuing what we WANT, rather than doing something to alleviate the suffering of the many homeless birds (or cats or dogs or other animals) whom we could benefit. And then we justify ourselves by saying that adoption is “too hard”, or that rescuers are corrupt, or whatever it takes to make ourselves feel good about our decisions about these living, feeling, beings.
What I’m going to say next is going to be even less popular than what I just said. Not counting the budgies I had when I was a kid, I’ve been living with birds nonstop for 24 years, and the longer I live with them, the more strongly I believe this. Unlike the animals we humans have domesticated, who have, over many thousands of years, adapted as species to live life with humans, birds are wild, although we may have *tamed* some, and now breed many into captivity. No matter the lengths I go to, and even if I were rich and could build a large flight aviary of the kind found at some zoos, there is nothing I can or could do that would even begin to approximate what my birds’ lives would be if they were living the life that they should have in the wild. They will never have the joy of truly free flight; they will never have their families or a real flock of their own kind. What we, as a species, have taken from them, we can never restore. The only really humane thing we can do for them is to take the best care we can of the ones from whom we have already stolen so much, and not facilitate any more being brought into a life which is just a sad shadow of the life they should have.
have you ever bred birds? or even hand fed birds?
i spend on Food alone not counting hand feeding formula at least 300 every 2 months on all my birds
I do NOT get no where near that when I sell a bird. My budgies I sell for $10 (parent raised)
Lovebirds- hand fed $50 each
I might sell a bird once or twice every 6-8 months
I have birds getting ready to turn a year old That only cost 10.00
I'm not raising their price because they're costing me MORE money in food.
I've actually lowered every lovebird I have for sale, any where from 50 bucks down to 20 bucks lower than what they started at when they were just weaned
I had to lower every cockatiel I had for sale from 90-50 dollars lower just so they would be sold.
when I do sell them, I sure don't make anything to defray the costs of feeding them because a $10 dollar budgie isn't going to make up for the Few hundred dollars in food it has eaten in the last year its lived here.
I keep a record of everything we buy for the birds, from food, to air purifiers, Every little thing that is for the birds is recorded ,including birds i've sold and bought ( and in the last 2 years i have only bought 6 birds)
at the end of the year when I finish the records off. I am always IN THE HOLE I never come out I always Spend more than I've "made" and its not a few dollars in the hole its a few hundred dollars in the hole!
so its not just Rescues who spend a lot of money housing birds