Georginia wrote:I personally don't see anything wrong with this. He is doing a great thing, and as long as he can actually care for all of these birds, he's fine. Now, it'd be a whole other story if he was doing it for the right reason, but just couldn't care for all of them but yet continued to do what he's doing.
Well, that's the whole point, isn't it? How could anybody -much less an old person- care for over 1,600 birds?! It's impossible no matter how you look at it. There aren't enough hours in the day to feed and clean all of them so forget about spending time with them. And let's not even go into the expense! You should see my supermarket bills and I only have 35 birds! Plus the housing... the cockatoo in the picture seems to be in a dog crate but, even if it isn't, it's not a parrot cage.
The problem is that even good-intentioned people could be doing harm if they are over their heads. I've seen it happened several times with people I knew myself. All rescuers have a 'hoarding streak' in them, it's part of being an animal lover. The good ones suppress it and just do as much good as they can but, sometimes, even the good ones fall into the trap of thinking that they are the only ones that can do it and end up taking in too many animals with the inevitable consequence of their not receiving the attention they need. Do you actually believe that the 91 year old cockatoo is going to the avian vet twice a year? Of course not! With 1,600 birds to feed and house, there is no way on this green earth that this man has the money or the time to do it. And, no, volunteers don't do it, either. They come and go and by the time they learned enough to do things without supervision and the birds got used to them, the greatest majority of them quits. Sometimes it's not even because they got 'tired' of doing it but because they have no choice...