Parrot Crisis Awareness Day: Loving Parrots Enough to Tell the Truth about Them
- LoraKim Joyner
- Mar 3
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 5
Most cages are not made of metal. Some are made of love. Some are made of good intentions. Some are made of stories we were told about what parrots need—and who parrots are. Others are made about what we need, no matter who parrots are. I’ve spent much of my life inside those stories. And I’ve spent just as much time unlearning them.
For decades I have lived and worked in the complicated and difficult world of parrots. I have witnessed and participated in harm that often hides behind affection. I have seen and participated in an industry and a trade that calls itself love. I have admired and loved parrots, but this is not enough.
I want to begin by telling you where I started. Like many people, I fell in love with parrots long before I understood them. I was captivated by their color, their brilliance, their sociability, their intelligence, their loyalty, and their humor. I loved how they seemed to listen, how they looked directly into you as if they recognized something no one else could see. I believed what most people believe: that a parrot in a home was lucky. That a parrot in a cage was cared for. That a parrot who talked was happy. That a bird veterinarian was beyond reproach for making a living caring for birds. I believed the story.
Exodor was a Nanday parakeet who was raised away from his parents and lived with me for many years. His parents were originally wild birds and eventually were euthanized because they carried a virus from their home that was infecting other birds in the breeding aviary
I grew up with parrots in my home, and, one after another, they died too young. I begin to doubt the story. Then I went to veterinary school to save them, worked as an avicultural veterinarian, and taught avian medicine at veterinary schools and conferences. I saw birds in tiny cages, sometimes wrapped in towels like fragile secrets, or chewing frantically to get out of cages, plastic kennels, and boxes.
I saw them featherless and anxious. Biting. Screaming, shaking, and plucking themselves bloody. I met parrots who had lived in five homes before they were ten years old, and who were meant to live seventy years.
Moluccan cockatoos with self-induced feather loss (photo by Foster Parrots)
I worked with a cockatoo who people thought was mean. He bit everyone.He screamed all day. He started tearing out his chest feathers until his skin was raw. My clients wanted me to fix him. I remember holding that bird in my hands, feeling his heart racing like so many trapped animals. I looked into his eyes and life, realizing something that would change me forever: there was nothing wrong with him. He was behaving exactly the way a wild, intelligent, emotionally complex being behaves when he is lonely, frightened, and confined. He wasn’t broken. The situation was.
That was the beginning of a long unraveling for me.
After veterinary school I worked at large breeding facilities for parrots and the fabric of my proposed career nearly smothered me. Birds were packed by the hundreds in large barns, one steel cage after another. Unable to fly, unable to choose, unable to do anything but lose their chicks to the pet trade.
The macaw barn at one facility where I worked
The final unweaving of my work happened when I went to Central America and saw parrots flying free in their native homes. They were not in cages. They were not set aside in a room without windows. They did not languish, sick from human mismanagement.
They were living with generations of family relations. They were flying miles upon miles in one day, and as they flew with seeds in their beaks, they planted the forest. The Indigenous and local communities loved them as they were, free. They saw themselves in the parrots who protected their nests and chicks with a fierce determination.
Free flying scarlet macaws protected in La Moskitia, Honduras
(publicity for the Parrot Crisis Summit in 2024. A summit is held every year.)
But they could not stop the relentless poachers, fueled by the parrot trade.
To take what was not theirs so it could become ours. I saw thousands of parrots lost to the trade, never flying, never living beyond one year of age, and bearing wounds that echo in my heart. I saw lands emptying of feathered beauty.
Rosa was taken from her wild nest in Honduras, and suffered 4 broken limbs, pneumonia, parasites, and starvation. She only lived to be 4 years of age.
Why? Over the years, questions began following me. The question was this:
If we love parrots so much, why do so many of them suffer? Why are rescue centers overflowing? Why do sanctuaries have waiting lists decades long? Why do parrots who are meant to fly miles every day spend their lives climbing the bars of cages? Why do the birds we call companions so often live with anxiety, frustration, and loss? Why are parrots the most endangered group of birds in the world? Why do Indigenous communities lose their cultural, spiritual, and ecosystem health so that what they love leaves them?
Indigenous Miskitus in Honduras, risking their lives
to protect the macaws in their parrot sanctuary
I started to realize that what I saw wasn’t a collection of individual problems.
It was a system. A system that takes wild beings and tries to fit them into human lives. A system that makes profit from their beauty and their intelligence. A system that depends on us not looking too closely.
I know how hard a deeper examination can be. The last thing I want to do is shame people who already share their lives with parrots. I have cared for parrots myself. I have had them in my home. I know the depth of those bonds. For the sake of our love, let us ask hard questions:
What if parrots were never meant to be pets at all?
What if no cage is big enough?
In my work of nearly 40 years in parrot conservation, I have stood in tropical forests and watched parrots cross the sky in bright, raucous rivers of color. I have also stood in back rooms where confiscated birds sat in silent rows, feathers broken, eyes dull. I have seen chicks pulled from nests, and crippled when their nest tree was cut down. I have seen adult birds who will never fly again. I have watched people surrender parrots they loved because they finally realized love was not enough.
Those experiences changed me. They taught me that parrots are not merely there to be recipients of our love. They are wild beings with cultures, families, and languages of their own. And almost everything about the modern pet trade asks them to stop being who they are.
Most people who buy parrots are kind people. They want a friend.They want connection. They want to care for something beautiful. The harm of the parrot trade is not driven mainly by cruelty, although that is also present, as is greed. It is driven by misunderstanding. We are told that parrots are easy. Parrots are adaptable. Parrots enjoy living with us. Parrots raised by humans are happier than parrots in the wild. That we need parrots in captivity to stave off extinction. These stories are comforting. They are also largely untrue. When reality collides with those stories, it is usually the parrot who pays the price.
Rosa (see previous photo above) paid the ulimate price. She never knew freedom as she was born to experience, like this wild scarlet macaw.
People sometimes ask me why I’m so direct about this topic. Why not just focus on conservation? Why not just help people do better? Because after decades in this field, I have come to believe something difficult: we cannot rescue or conserve our way out of the harm we are creating. For every parrot saved, more are bred, sold, or captured; for every cage opened, another one is filled. If we only treat the symptoms, the suffering never ends.
If you share your life with a parrot, I want you to hear me clearly. I am not accusing. I am inviting. I invite you to look honestly at a system most of us inherited without questioning. I invite you to imagine new ways of loving parrots that do not require owning them. I invite you to imagine new ways of living in solidarity with all of life. I am not asking you to stop loving birds. I am asking you to love them enough to know the truth.
For now, I want to leave you with one simple thought. Parrots did not evolve to live with us, bereft of choice and freedom. We decided to make them that way and to take what was not ours. Every decision has a cost. Knowing the truth, let us pay it forward. You can help end the Parrot Crisis by sharing this blog with another, distributing Parrot Crisis Awareness Day materials on March 10, 2026, joining the International Alliance for the Protection of Parrots, refraining from buying, selling, or breeding parrots. In short, "adopt," don't "shop." If you have a parrot now, take the best care of this bird that you can and don't release them to the wild as they likely would not survive. And most of all, dare to love enough, as described in these words from Mary Oliver in her poem “Blackwater Woods.”
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
To love what is mortal.
To hold it against your bones knowing
Your own life depends on it;
And when the time comes to let it go, let it go.
Together let us not just open the cage door but break it completely.*
*Note: This is a vision, and not an actual concrete action. If you have a parrot in your home, do not release them to the wild. They will have a hard time surviving and there are risks not just for the bird, but for the ecosystem.
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