Laws about transportation and unweaned birds

[sirfire]

But dont we all agree Hand raising birds is a form a cruelty?

My understanding is that laws or no laws we shouldnt do it at all.

I have no issues i just wanted to know if it was cruel and most of you agree that it is correct?

So in short unless the bird falls out of its nest or it is incubator raised it is in fact cruel to remove it from its nests!

[vettepilot_6]

Its also cruel to keep birds in small cages/avairies but we all do it.. I would love to have fortitude of handraising for times when I need to do it ie desertion or fallen or unaccepted young (times I have tried I have failed with finches sadly)...but we all like pets be it hand raised or otherwise....

[jusdeb]

I do have twangs of guilt when I remove babies for hand rearing however I only hand rear for people I know or their friends so I can gauge the type of people who are taking my babies .

Hand rearing is sometimes a lifesaving tool for young birds abandoned or struggling to compete with larger siblings .

Whether it is cruel or not is up to each persons opinion , I see a good result so dont consider it cruel .

I think you need to look into the grey area here for answers and not the black and white writings of the law ...Yes I hand rear but no I would not sell an unweaned bird .

Of course people will do what they want and I can only hope the selling of unweaned birds and the mass hand rearing of babies for pet shops stops happening but it wont .

This topic could go on forever , it is up there with crop needling , wing clipping and pellets and when it comes to parrots people have very strong opinions on all of these .

I hope that if you do find a baby that is in trouble that you will choose to hand feed it

[sirfire]

Its also cruel to keep birds in small cages/avairies but we all do it.. I would love to have fortitude of handraising for times when I need to do it ie desertion or fallen or unaccepted young (times I have tried I have failed with finches sadly)...but we all like pets be it hand raised or otherwise....

Well agreed .... that moves to my next point minimum size of aviaries!!! but I will discuss this later.

I do accept that if a bird is abandoned that you should be able to find someone or if you have the time do it yourself to hand raise a bird. I personally do not see the difference between you and another breeder doing it .... it could be cruel if you do not have the time to feed the bird 6 times a day as they demand it so IMHO you could either give the bird away to someone who can do this or do a humane way of killing the bird so that it does suffer as you are away 50% of the day.

[jusdeb]

Yes good points and as I said there is a huge grey area . I dont hand rear so many that it becomes a chore so my attitude is different .
I feel that you only take what you can give quality time to else its no point since we are trying to achieve companion birds . I have had a recent crop complication so am very cautious as to not stressing my birds which is where Im coming from when I say no to selling unweaned birds .

So while I stick to my opinion I agree that sometimes we have to think outside the square . Also the birds welfare comes first and foremost .

[GregH]

Sirfire this is an interesting topic for me but it doesn’t have a single answer. There are facts, there are morals and there are legal answers but which is more correct is purely subjective. I think that there are many things wrong with the world but keeping captive animals isn't one of them as long as it's done properly or you're not a member of PETA. From a human perspective using ivermectin to target parasites in livestock is good management - it benefits the birds and rewards the owner with healthy stock but who spares a thought got the poor tape-worms and airsac mites? Has not their evolutionary path taken as long as their host and owner and have they not faced as many hard-won battles? What give us the right to destroy their lives? Our own bodies hosts and our immune system dispatches a myriad of mites, nematodes, protazoans, bacteria and viruses everyday and we do it without a thought to the carnage within us. Looking for fairness in life is a pointless task which is why we have religion - it makes us feel better and that is not pointless.

Pulling a bird for hand rearing and imprinting it for human companionship is surely less cruel than taking a bird from the wild and letting it live a miserable existence trapped in a small cage in close proximity to a huge predator (humans). But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep or use animals. The moral stance taken by the likes of PETA and the like whose views are best expressed by the philosopher Peter Singer are not any more imbued with infallible and immutable ethical principles than the redneck that goes shooting for fun every weekend. The decisions that we make as a society are enshrined in law because we choose the view of the majority so as to promote a harmonious society.

When Australia was colonized by Europeans they changed the ecology of the continent by rounding up the Aboriginal people and "civilizing" them. Was this wrong? Ask any Aboriginal person if they would like to endure a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the answer would be a resounding no. The consequences of this decision is that removing traditional management is causing the extinction of many species including finches. Mike Fidler has more Gouldians than now exist in the wild and surely having a reserve captive populations is better than extinction. If the Aborigines created an artificial ecosystem perhaps it's returning to how it would have been 100000 years ago and Gouldian numbers are returning to what they were. Is that "wrong" or "right"? I actually think attempting to introduce morality to such questions is not at all helpful as these decisions are purely subjective and there is no final arbiter of what is right and to say so overrides the rights of those that would dare disagree with you.

What we can do is try to cause the least misery to all our fellow companions on this journey that is life by understanding their needs. Of course needs are sometimes antagonistic to our own desires - don't think a tiger pities you as it dismembers you alive and eats you. We are all different

[MadOzzie]

PETA = People Enjoying Tasty Animals

[jusdeb]

ooops bad madozzie bad

[sirfire]

Sirfire this is an interesting topic for me but it doesn’t have a single answer. There are facts, there are morals and there are legal answers but which is more correct is purely subjective. I think that there are many things wrong with the world but keeping captive animals isn't one of them as long as it's done properly or you're not a member of PETA. From a human perspective using ivermectin to target parasites in livestock is good management - it benefits the birds and rewards the owner with healthy stock but who spares a thought got the poor tape-worms and airsac mites? Has not their evolutionary path taken as long as their host and owner and have they not faced as many hard-won battles? What give us the right to destroy their lives? Our own bodies hosts and our immune system dispatches a myriad of mites, nematodes, protazoans, bacteria and viruses everyday and we do it without a thought to the carnage within us. Looking for fairness in life is a pointless task which is why we have religion - it makes us feel better and that is not pointless.

Pulling a bird for hand rearing and imprinting it for human companionship is surely less cruel than taking a bird from the wild and letting it live a miserable existence trapped in a small cage in close proximity to a huge predator (humans). But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep or use animals. The moral stance taken by the likes of PETA and the like whose views are best expressed by the philosopher Peter Singer are not any more imbued with infallible and immutable ethical principles than the redneck that goes shooting for fun every weekend. The decisions that we make as a society are enshrined in law because we choose the view of the majority so as to promote a harmonious society.

When Australia was colonized by Europeans they changed the ecology of the continent by rounding up the Aboriginal people and "civilizing" them. Was this wrong? Ask any Aboriginal person if they would like to endure a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the answer would be a resounding no. The consequences of this decision is that removing traditional management is causing the extinction of many species including finches. Mike Fidler has more Gouldians than now exist in the wild and surely having a reserve captive populations is better than extinction. If the Aborigines created an artificial ecosystem perhaps it's returning to how it would have been 100000 years ago and Gouldian numbers are returning to what they were. Is that "wrong" or "right"? I actually think attempting to introduce morality to such questions is not at all helpful as these decisions are purely subjective and there is no final arbiter of what is right and to say so overrides the rights of those that would dare disagree with you.

What we can do is try to cause the least misery to all our fellow companions on this journey that is life by understanding their needs. Of course needs are sometimes antagonistic to our own desires - don't think a tiger pities you as it dismembers you alive and eats you. We are all different

This is well written. I think it always goes down to self beliefs and society standards to what is right or wrong. In reality organisations like PETA called be one extreme and a gun totting redneck is the other. I fully agree that we need to be somewhere in the in middle ....and while we do not always see eye to eye i believe all here are trying their best to make birds as happy as they can be living with human beings.

Thank you for your deep well thought out opinion.