Pajarita wrote:I disagree with the 'some petstores that sell animals are not bad'. If a store sells animals, the owner (manager, employee) will always consider them merchandise and not living beings with needs and feelings. There is no two ways about this because, for a business, the bottom like is always profit and not the 'stock' wellbeing and will sell the animals to whoever has the money to pay for them. They will even lie to people about how easy it is to care for a bird ("low maintenance" - "just get a cage and some food and it'll be fine"). Petstores have been known (documented, mind you!) to put sick animals in a freezer to kill them so as not to pay for a vet.
As to the poor animals stuck in there... It is truly sad, no doubt about it! But it all comes down to on which side of the overpopulation problem you want to be. If you don't care about so many birds not having a home, they you would not mind patronizing them and contributing to the problem. If you do care, then you would not patronize them and only adopt. AND, if you go even deeper into the dilemma, it's also a matter of whether you are a true bird lover or just a bird enjoyer. A true bird lover would care about all the poor birds out there, a bird enjoyer would only care about the birds that bring him/her pleasure.
I stay away from stores that sell animals. I buy my stuff mostly online or in places where they don't sell animals. This doesn't meant that I never use them. If there is an emergency and I need something immediately and cannot wait for a delivery, I would use them (the baby squirrels formula was one of those cases because I couldn't wait a day or two, I needed it right away so I had to go to a Petco to get it). And it doesn't mean that I have never, ever bought a bird at a store, either. I once bought two cockatoos from a terrible petstore in Pennsylvania. They had been there for two years on 'consignment' from the previous owners and they wanted the same price that two babies would have cost even though they were 19 and 23 at the time and one of them plucked and self-mutilated. I was part of a dog and cat rescue group and one of the volunteers, knowing that I had a bird rescue, told me about them so I went to see and was horrified at the conditions they were being kept (a medium size cage in a dark corner and eating only seeds - they were both umbrellas but Coco, the one that self-mutilated, was so small, so plucked and so dirty that I couldn't even tell what species she was! -she had been kept in a closet for two years before she was given to the petstore because she hated her owner's new husband). So I pooled together my birthday and Mother's Day presents (I asked everybody for cash) and I bought them.
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