Referring to the "two approaches" Elizabeth enumerates, I liked numbers 1, 4 and 5 and 8, and in varying degrees felt uneasy with 2, 3, 6 and 7. Specific reactions below interpolated in red, followed by general comments. -jonathan
BIRDS CONTINUE FOR SALE
1. Pet sellers and staff could attend Mickaboo's Basic Bird Care & Avian Lighting classes and provide feedback on the material and Mickaboo could share what we've learned from our end of the "business" GOOD
2. Pet sellers could purchase "gift certificates" for each of their customers to attend a Mickaboo Bird Care class before purchasing a bird (say for $35/family) & Mickaboo could teach them the basics of up-to-date avian care (much more efficiently than pet sellers doing it one customer at a time)
3. Same for the Avian Lighting class UNEASY WITH 2 AND 3. It smacks of a shakedown (we want a cut of your action) and thereby makes us tacitly complicit in the rest of their activities — or so it feels to me.
4. Pet sellers could do an audit of the foods and supplies they sell in order to eliminate unsafe/unhealthy products and Mickaboo volunteers could help GOOD
5. Pet sellers could agree to minimum cage sizes per species and Mickaboo could provide information based on years of seeing what doesn't work for birds GOOD, although there are other health and happiness issues in pet stores besides cage size.
6. Pet sellers could contribute funds towards the care of unwanted and surrendered birds (whether to SFACC to divvy up amongst the rescues they use or to Mickaboo directly) and Mickaboo would have one more revenue stream to continue doing the work that needs to be done. OK, but again smacks of a shakedown and gets easily factored into the cost of doing business. They may just pass it on to customers or, worse, cut corners elsewhere to stay competitive, to their birds' detriment.
7. Pet sellers could publicize the many, many, many homeless birds that Mickaboo has available for adoption in their stores. WELL ... OK, they could do that, but will they? They already hate us and slander us at every opportunity. They might agree to have our flyers at their stores (like PetCo has a sign saying "Consider adoption first"), but do you really imagine they'd stop bad-mouthing us and our birds? Here, ironically they are correct — we ARE competitors; only it's they who would want us out of their profit-making way. At best (if they did honorably display our materials) it offers them cheap tokenism and makes us implicitly endorse their stores as they now are.
I believe if we have to swallow the continued sale of birds, we should divorce ourselves from anything that smacks of endorsing their practices, or worse seems like a shakedown or sell-out on our part (money for Mickaboo = we tolerate their abuses). IMO, our attention should be focused entirely on what the stores themselves need to do in order to provide adequate care to their birds and education to their customers. If they want our help, that's fine, but we shouldn't require it, so long as they agree to shoulder the responsibility. So that's where I would start. We want birds to be well treated from the time they are hatched to the time they are sold. We want people who purchase and keep birds to be well informed about what birds need in terms of diet, medical care, stimulation, and social interaction - at a minimum.
I would then stress that this is not happening, and for us to be OK with bird sales that has to change fundamentally. We have to be in agreement about what adequate bird care is (for each species), diet, veterinary care, etc. We must insist that bird care sheets and bird care guidance by pet stores are often inadequate. Something more like Mickaboo's basic bird care class is needed - and that can't be done in under a couple hours. If they want to give their own basic bird care classes, based on an agreed curriculum and standards, that's fine. If they want to pay Mickaboo to do it that's fine too. But it has to be a pre-condition for sale. People need to know what they're getting into. No more impulse buying.
And I want full disclosure of where they're getting their birds. We should demand the right to inspect those facilities. If we can discuss minimum standards for cages and pet store sales, then I think it's time to discuss minimum standards at breeding facilities. No more supporting avian slave-mills.
Now of course If birds are no longer for sale, then I have no problem with 2, 3, 6, or 7. In fact, the burden maybe shifts to what WE can do to mitigate the effects on them. I think we can offer to hold adoption fairs or educational events at their stores to bring in traffic, to recommend them to our volunteers and the public at large, to (maybe) let them keep some of our foster birds or (maybe maybe) encourage them to take in others we cannot house. ??? ...