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Mummy's Introduction |
This place, where I live and work, is a little refuge for unwanted pet birds who were once kept in cages. Sometimes they were small cages, sometimes a bit bigger - but never large enough to fly in, only to hop or flit in. And that isn't the same as flying. So I built an aviary - in fact I built three, so that the birds here can fly as much as they want to. All except for one cockatiel, confined for so long to a small bell-shaped cage that, though her wings are perfect, she cannot use them. She became a bell-shaped bird, as if moulded by the cage. She lives, nonetheless, in the aviary with the others - but I have put in a false floor so that when she falls she isn't injured. At least she has company now, and space to climb around even though she cannot fly.
Confining birds to cages, thus preventing them from flying, is generally considered the norm. "Budgies always come in cages," someone said to me once! But to me this practice is unacceptable and cruel. I have seen canaries in gold cages mounted on a wall like pictures, or kept either side of a fireplace like ornaments! I came across a cockatiel shut in a cage for nearly a decade, and so malnourished on his diet of seed and grit that he closely resembled a bottle brush. And I was given another who twists her neck neurotically because the ceiling in her cage was so low that it touched her head. I found my affectionate hand-tame lovebird behind the bars of a cage so filthy that it stank; and a lonely, broken-spirited rosella, caged all its life, who died without seeing his new aviary home. Let me not omit the cockatiel hen who began a new life in an aviary only to have both her legs amputated by a fox as she clung to the mesh because the aviary had not been double-wired. The examples of neglect are endless, though most are borne of thoughtlessness or ignorance rather than any actual desire to inflict suffering.
There are no laws in England that say that birds should fly, but I do. After all they have wings, and their natural habitat is the air. Would you keep a dog, cat or horse in a cage? Then why keep a bird in conditions that prevent it from doing the one thing that birds are meant to do - FLY!
The English law states that it is enough for a bird to have room to stand and stretch its wings in a cage, but what human would like to spend his life in a room little bigger than a telephone box, where he could only just stand and stretch his limbs? The implicit cruelty of this law should not be ignored.
These stories, to which new ones will be added every now and then, are written mainly for children, in the hope that in generations to come treatment of domestic birds will improve so that these delightful creatures need not suffer any longer. But I hope that adults will read them too! Some of you no doubt already allow your birds to fly. And it is to you that I dedicate my stories!