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 TradeWild Pets and Laboratory Animals: Birds: Page 1 Customers in pet stores, seeing docile parrots and chattering finches, rarely realize that these birds are the survivors of a trade that kills as many as 15 million birds per year. In the homes of pet owners, many wild-caught birds, especially large parrots, fail to adjust to captivity and die from a variety of illnesses, from salmonella contracted in quarantine stations to the lethal wasting disease which is untreatable. Since large parrots, such as macaws, cockatoos and Amazon parrots, may live to an advanced age, birds captured for the pet trade may have spent 20 years or more in the wild, in the company of other parrots, flocking, foraging and roosting together 24 hours a day. In recommending against the purchase of macaws, ornithologist Charles Munn (1988) said:. "A long life in a small cage is dismal and cruel compared with life in the wild . . . For such intensely social birds, life alone in a cage must be the ultimate psychological torture." Parrots are long-lived birds, surviving 80 or more years, but in captivity, their lives usually last less than a decade.
Research has revealed that many parrots are highly intelligent. Their brain size is far larger in proportion to their bodies than other birds. One Gray Parrot (Psittacus erithacus), Alex, studied for many years by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, has an IQ equivalent to a 3-year-old child, and a vocabulary of more than 100 words that he understands the meaning of; he does not just repeat them. He recognizes more than 30 objects which he can identify by name, and when asked conceptual questions (“Which key is green?”), he is able to select the correct one more than 80 percent of the time. He understands what "round" and other shapes and sizes mean, and can tell what different objects might have in common, such as color (Kaufman 1991). Parrots compare in intelligence with primates, yet most pet parrots are treated like animated tape recorders, taught to repeat phrases. There are different standards for captive birds than for mammals. For example, if we saw a case of a pet deer or antelope hobbling about with its legs tied together to prevent it from running away, we would alert the local humane society and police. Yet bird owners routinely clip the wing feathers of their pets to prevent flight. This results in an equal hindrance of movement and causes the bird anxiety because it cannot fly from a potential threat, yet it is neither illegal nor frowned upon.
Until recently, the United States was the world's largest importer of wild birds, providing an enormous market for exotic finches, parrots, cockatoos, mynahs and other birds. Almost 1 million birds a year were imported during the 1980s. A large percentage of these birds, approximately 80 percent, were wild-caught in the tropical forests and grasslands of Latin America and Asia and the sub-Saharan region of Africa. All parrots (Order Psittaciformes)--except the Budgerigar, Cockatiel and Rose-ringed Parakeet-- were added to Appendix II of CITES in 1981. However, because of failure to enforce the provisions of the treaty, which require that export be allowed only if it does not adversely affect the species, this had little effect on limiting the massive trade. At the height of the 1980s wild bird trade, the Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds estimated that 500,000 wild parrots were being captured per year worldwide.
The U.S. Congress enacted the Wild Bird Conservation Act (WBCA) in 1992, a law that effectively stopped commercial imports of wild parrots and all other birds listed on the Appendices of CITES. It allows zoological imports, non-CITES birds, and some captive-bred birds. The law sharply reduced the importation of wild birds. For example, from January 1996 to July 1998, according to a study by the Animal Welfare Institute, 273,288 birds were imported, based on U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service import data and U.S. Department of Agriculture bird quarantine forms. Of those, an estimated 70 percent, or 191,324 birds, were captive-bred canaries, finches, budgerigars and cockatiels. Some illegalities were noted, such as the import of some 1,379 wild parrots from Latin America, of which only 457 were seized. Most of the other wild birds were finches from Tanzania, China and Vietnam. Since this study was done, China has ceased exporting wild birds. The study uncovered the need for a better system of recording bird imports by the Fish and Wildlife Service to assure accuracy and allow proper enforcement of the WBCA as well as CITES, the Endangered Species Act and other legislation. The data entry system of the Fish and Wildlife Service is based on a letter code assigned to individual species, but a large number of entries at the ports of entry were found to be inaccurate, and there was insufficient oversight at headquarters.
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