This is a fascinating topic that has so many different elements that can be a topic unto themselves in aviculture.
Beautiful first post btw, macawpower. My birds are 6 (the Timneh), 5 (the Galah), and 4 (the Blue Throated Macaw). We raised them from a very young age, both me and my wife love them as family and they get along with both of us. The Timneh seems to favor me though.
Can’t say that I contemplate the exact same thing as you are right now, or have. For me, I simply knew that life would be a journey with these amazing animals and, as there is no real factual “body of knowledge,” that I would learn a lot along the way. To be honest with you, wherever life takes me with them I just want my birds to be happy, healthy, etc. If I can provide that for the duration of their lives I think I will have accomplished a lot. I know there will be stages and that they are birds and I’m a human and that has been the reason for my trying to learn as much about them as possible. Sometimes you have to learn indirectly. My trips to Peru, Costa Rica, Belize, volunteer work with birds of prey. I guess I’ve never contemplated my “baby’s” growing up and leaving because I never wanted them as surrogate children to begin with. I think that’s a huge mistake in aviculture (again, one of those side topics).
I think I can draw a parallel with your question “are we raising birds for someone else” and say that hypothetically maybe we (humans) shouldn’t raise them at all. If, for instance, they were parent raised and then came to us I think these problems wouldn’t exist. Then it would also be a matter of our attitude whether they could remain with us for life. They’d be animals in our care that we could still mutually reach out to, socialize, have a relationship, with. Also, if parent raised, they probably would be better set up to deal with that for life. What I mean is that the brain has critical developmental (juvenile) stages and without the proper stimuli can suffer from this parental deprivation. In addition to them being inappropriately bonded to us, across speices a deprived (technically traumatized) brain leads to PTSD type symptoms later on in life. We see stereotypical motions, self mutilation, not only in caged animals but in human children growing up in impoverished orphanages. And, on the flip side, a parrot raised by it’s own parents (also has to do with proper environment)- that developing brain is getting the stimuli that it genetically needs to become normal. The brain reaches a self-regulatory state (once developed) that sets that animal up to deal with change and adversity for life (living with humans, etc.). Once normal it stays normal. It wouldn't look to you and want to mate with you or switch affection from one human to the next and no PTSD type issues we see in human raised birds. So, for me it's not "did we raise them," or "did a breeder," it's "did a human raise them or a parrot?" I think aviculture could establish a practice where parrots are parent raised in aviary's and not sold as pets until early adult. Sure, fewer people would buy them because they wouldn't be the docile baby's that tempt most people, but then again, imo they should be in the hands of a minority of people to begin with. I'm just guessing but this might be a better practice and attitude based only on the science of it. If they were treated like birds they wouldn't care which human was the caretaker. It works for falconry. Where, if the bird is not wild caught it is raised in an aviary by other birds. The human does not interfere in any way. His presence is only to habituate the young bird to himself, but he's no more than a piece of furniture. Otherwise, the issues that human raised falcons show are similar to what we see and struggle with when it comes to parrots. In this case, the falcon has no utilitarian purpose.