Inside the squalid “bird mills” that breed tropical parrots for America’s pet stores

Statistically speaking, a lot of your neighbors probably have a dog or cat. But there’s a decent chance that there are at least a few parrots in your neighborhood, too: About one in 20 US households owns at least one pet bird.

There’s the popular parakeet, a small parrot native to Australia and other regions south of the equator; there are the cockatiels, who appear to have perpetual bed-head, with a tuft of feathers springing from their forehead; and a diverse cast of other parrot species: macaws, lovebirds, amazons, conures, African Greys, cockatoos, and many more.

Some 13 million birds are kept as pets in the United States, making them the fourth most popular type of pet and a sizable share of the broader exotic pet market, which also includes fish, lizards, snakes, chinchillas, and frogs. Cats and dogs may get most of the attention, but these smaller, more wild animals account for around 40 percent of the US pet population.

As cute as they may be, however, a number of animal behaviorists, veterinarians, and ethicists are challenging the practice of keeping these smaller species as pets.

For one, they’re largely wild, undomesticated animals, who’ve evolved to thrive in rich and often vast habitats in nature. But as pets, they spend all or most of their life confined in a small cage or tank. Add to that the fact that owners often aren’t well equipped to provide the enrichment and individualized care these animals need, and keeping them as pets becomes much more ethically thorny than it otherwise might appear.

The harms of bird ownership stand out the most, if only for the stark reason that in captivity, pet birds can’t do what millions of years of evolution has propelled them to do: fly. And given their advanced cognitive capacities, captivity is likely particularly stressful for them — and exacerbated when kept alone, considering that many are highly social.

Liz Cabrera Holtz of the animal advocacy nonprofit World Animal Protection put it bluntly: ”These are wild animals whose physical and psychological needs are not even close to being met.”

But even before they’re bought as pets, the business of bringing the majority of these animals into the world often involves serious harm and neglect. A new investigation suggests that this might be common when they come from “bird mills” — high-volume, large-scale operations that breed birds for the retail pet market.

Last year, a prolific animal cruelty investigator who goes by the pseudonym Pete Paxton, due to the clandestine nature of his work, toured and covertly filmed several US bird mills and shared his investigation exclusively with Vox. He found dirty conditions, thousands of birds stuffed in cages, and alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act, a federal law that sets minimum welfare standards for some of the pet breeding industry.

Over the course of his career, Paxton has investigated some 300 factory farms and slaughterhouses, and more than 1,000 puppy mills. He has seen animals beaten, starved, hanged, and shocked. Even so, he was still surprised by what he saw in the bird breeding operations. “I did not expect it to be as bad as it was,” Paxton told me about his new investigation, which is one of the first such exposés of the industry that supplies pet birds to millions of American homes.

Paxton’s investigation began last spring in South Texas, just 20 miles north of the Mexico border. He was there to visit a bird breeding operation called Fancy Parrots, which has more than 3,000 parrots of various species on site, including African Greys, macaws, and cockatoos, locked in rusting cages across 17 barns. (The descriptions of Fancy Parrots and the other facilities below come from Paxton’s investigation video.)

It was “very loud — lots of birds calling out to us,” Paxton said, comparing them to puppy mills he’s visited, the air full of bird screeches instead of dog barks.

On a tour of the facility, Paxton was told that a few years ago, some 20 birds died during a cold snap. The barns each had a roof but no sides, which meant they could get some fresh air and sunlight, but it also meant they were vulnerable to weather extremes not found in their native habitats.

Some of the birds had plucked some of their feathers out, which Alix Wilson, an exotic pet veterinarian, told me is abnormal. “Birds in their natural environment wouldn’t do that because their feathers are so vital for survival,” Wilson said.

The reasons for feather-plucking are often behavioral in nature, Wilson said, due to boredom, stress, or sexual frustration from the inability to mate, though it can also be brought on by disease or poor diet, according to UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

At bird mills, larger parrots are caged as mating pairs, and parakeets are caged in groups. The birds first mate in the spring, and a week or so after mating, the female will lay a clutch of about two to six eggs. The eggs of larger parrots are typically taken away and placed in artificial incubators, which can trigger the females to lay more eggs. After the chicks hatch, they’re reared either by humans or adult parrots.

About two decades ago, Wilson briefly worked at a parrot mill. “I quickly became aware of the issues of just confining these animals and just basically breeding [them] for profit,” Wilson told me. Those issues included fighting, which resulted in wounds and missing eyes and toes; resource-guarding (some birds keeping other birds away from food); parent-chick separation, either immediately after birth or post-weaning; and cramming birds into crates for long-distance transportation to pet stores.

Bird breeders are legally required to provide enrichment for their birds, such as perches, swings, mirrors, and other objects the birds can manipulate to express natural behaviors. Fancy Parrots does provide perches, but when Paxton asked about other enrichment, he was told that the US Department of Agriculture “wanted toys in all the cages; how stupid.” They had suggested to the USDA inspector that they could give the parrots bamboo, which the birds like to chew on, though Paxton didn’t see any.

Fancy Parrots declined an interview request for this story.

During the tour, Paxton was told that Fancy Parrots supplies to a “Petco distributor.” Petco declined an interview request for this story, though a spokesperson said over email that “Fancy Parrots is not nor has ever been a Petco vendor.”

This may be true. But it is also possible Petco does sell birds from Fancy Parrots, which underscores a major issue in tracking exotic pets in the United States.

Breeders typically don’t market their juvenile birds directly to large retailers like Petco. Instead, the animals first get purchased by intermediary operations called brokers. The “Petco distributor” could well be a broker that Fancy Parrots sells to, which then sells to Petco. (Petco did not respond to follow-up questions about whether it might indirectly source birds, via a broker, from Fancy Parrots.)

Months after visiting Fancy Parrots, Paxton headed to Central Oklahoma, where he toured a massive parakeet breeding operation about 70 miles east of downtown Oklahoma City owned by a family named the Pletts. There, he found rows and rows of tiny cages stacked atop one another, each packed with birds, totaling some 7,500 animals. Some of the cages were caked in feces.

The parakeet mill, he said, reminded him of egg-producing operations, where chickens are crammed into stacked cages — “factory farm-like,” Paxton said.

Paxton documented a pile of dead parakeets and severed body parts in a trash can, including one dead bird placed headfirst into a red Solo cup.

One of the owners is heard saying on the video that some birds peck at each other, which causes injuries, and he can’t sell the ones that are pecked at. These ones are killed, the man explains, by suffocating them in bags.

“There are always some dead,” the man is heard saying. “Always.”

The owner of the facility didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview.

Paxton visited another parakeet breeder in Oklahoma, some 60 miles farther east, run by relatives of the Pletts. The operation had two barns holding 1,500 birds total. In one barn, the birds allegedly had no perches or enrichment of any kind, which are required by the Animal Welfare Act. Paxton also found several dead, featherless chicks decomposing atop cages.

“Both facilities were filthy, with every surface I could see being dusty, dirty, and in some cases piled with manure and old feed,” Paxton said.

In 2024, an inspector with the USDA, which enforces the Animal Welfare Act, found at least six birds at the operation showed signs of heat stress, after the barn temperature had reached 93.4 degrees Fahrenheit with a heat index of 110.7. At the time, they also found at least six dead birds.

The USDA classified it as a “direct” violation of the Animal Welfare Act, but only issued an official warning — which amounts to a slap on the wrist — rather than a license suspension or even a nominal fine.

When reached by phone, one of the owners of the operation answered but did not respond to requests for comment.

As terrible as the conditions were, they may well be typical of how most soon-to-be pet birds are reared in the US, rather than exceptions.

“These bird mills I filmed are not outliers,” Paxton said in his investigation video. “All of the places that I went to are USDA-licensed, government regulated. Essentially, these places are operating legally and [largely] in compliance, so when it comes to bird mills…that’s as good as a place can get.”

Paxton investigated the bird mills on behalf of the nonprofits World Animal Protection and Strategies for Ethical and Environmental Development. (Disclosure: In 2024, my partner worked on a short-term consulting project for the latter group.)

Beyond captive breeding, some birds that wind up in US homes have been taken directly from the wild, according to a new analysis by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity using federal government data. From 2016 to 2024, the US imported more than 37,000 birds on average each year, with 5 percent of them — 1,865 birds — plucked from the wild. It’s a small share, but the true number could well be much higher, as it’s not uncommon in the exotic pet trade for importers to launder wild-caught animals through captive-bred operations and mislabel them.

It’s unknown how many birds are captive-bred in the US, as neither the pet industry nor the federal government publish data on pet breeding.

Paxton’s investigation reveals a paradox in the exotic pet trade. Surveys show that people buy parrots in large part because they’re “fun to watch” and have at home, given their exotic looks, intelligence, sociability, and some species’ capability for human-like speech. But parrot owners are also highly motivated, surveys show, to buy a bird for companionship, love, and affection. And yet, they’re bought from businesses that frequently treat them with just the opposite.

Even if pet owners have the best of intentions, some of the same welfare issues found at breeders persist when the birds are taken home. The most pressing and obvious one is captivity, as it puts the animals in an unnatural environment and prevents them from engaging in basic natural behaviors.

“The cages in the [investigation] video — that’s the same size cage that people put a bird in in their house,” Wilson, the veterinarian, said. Some birds may be kept in bigger cages — and many are provided with a fair amount of time outside their cage, or even free reign of a room or entire home — but they’re still captive all the same, and deprived of meaningful flight. It’s common for parrot owners to clip or trim their animals’ wings to limit their flight capability in order to prevent escape or injury from, say, flying into a ceiling fan.

Caging is “a setup for problems,” Wilson said. Another one of those problems is unhygienic conditions.

“If you confine a bird, they’re just very messy — they poop a lot, and when they eat, they make a mess, and so it doesn’t take much for the birds to end up in a really filthy environment,” Wilson said, not unlike what Paxton saw at the bird mills. In a survey, pet bird owners rated “general clean up” as the leading drawback to having a bird.

Another is the sedentary lifestyle imposed by captivity, which — especially when combined with diets high in fatty nuts and seeds — can lead to obesity, Wilson said. It’s common among pet birds, and it makes them more likely to develop arthritis, heart disease, and other conditions.

Feather plucking and other self-destructive behaviors are common among pet birds, too, with estimates of it afflicting some 10 to 17.5 percent of these animals, suggesting general distress.

Parrots’ high intelligence could worsen the harms of captivity. A 2021 study found that the larger a captive bird’s brain, the more likely they were to develop behaviors that indicate stress, such as abnormal and repetitive pacing and cage bar biting.

Other issues include lack of enrichment and access to veterinary care, and bird owners’ lack of knowledge about what their pet needs.

Even the most devoted bird owners, Wilson said — the ones who are with their birds around the clock, who don’t go on vacation, and who even cook for them — will fall short: “There’s no way anyone could reasonably provide good welfare to those animals in captivity.”

And many bird owners, she said, aren’t prepared for these animals’ long lifespans: Some popular parrot species can live up to 50 years or longer. Long-lived pet species — parrots, but also some turtles and snakes — often end up shuffled around to different homes or to underfunded animal sanctuaries when their owner dies, divorces, moves, or can no longer deal with the difficulty of keeping them as pets.

Few understand this better than Karen Windsor, the executive director of Foster Parrots and the New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary, a Rhode Island-based animal sanctuary. Windsor told me that a lot of people fall for these birds after seeing videos of parrots who seem to talk so conversantly with their owners. But not all parrots talk or like to be cuddled or handled, she said. Some are really loud, destructive, or aggressive. That leads to a lot of disappointed and desperate parrot owners asking sanctuaries like Windsor’s to take them in, but many don’t have the space and resources to accommodate most requests.

“We’re still dealing with birds that were bred in the ’70s and ’80s — they’re still in the system,” Judy Tennant, executive director of the rescue organization Parrot Partners Canada, recently told CTV News. And the industry is “still pumping out new birds,” Tennant said.

If it’s impossible to meet birds’ complex needs in captivity, then there’s only one logical conclusion: We should stop breeding them. But breaking the pet bird habit might be easier said than done.

Keeping parrots as pets was largely a niche hobby in the United States and Europe up until the 1970s, when interest began to surge. Bird ownership has declined a little in recent decades, though millions of Americans are still dazzled enough by their striking colors and high intelligence and sociability to buy one — and tens of millions more look on through short-form videos on TikTok and beyond.

So how can we start to shift away from bird ownership?

We could start by making their purchase a little harder. Hundreds of US jurisdictions — mostly cities and counties but also some states — have banned pet stores from selling cats, dogs, and sometimes rabbits, instead only allowing adoption, though none of these laws have yet included birds. World Animal Protection, the animal advocacy nonprofit involved in Paxton’s investigation, is advocating for that to change, and if successful, it could make a meaningful impact; nationally, more than half of all pet birds are currently purchased from pet stores.

Federal action is needed, too. For decades, bird breeding operations were exempt from the Animal Welfare Act, which means they weren’t inspected by the USDA for potential welfare violations. That changed a couple years ago. The move represents progress, but the USDA’s enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act has long been terrible. Improving it would help, and so would congressional action that requires all bird breeders be subject to inspection. Currently, smaller operations — those that sell fewer than 200 small birds annually, or eight larger birds annually — are exempt.

The pet industry as well as the pet bird keeping community could also step up more. For the millions of American households that already have a pet bird, they can give their animals as good of a life as possible. That would look like providing ample enrichment, adequate veterinary care, and balanced and diverse diets; a large cage and plenty of time out of it; learning extensively about their bird’s natural behaviors and needs; and paying close attention to their birds’ cues when it comes to handling, interaction, and time out of the cage or outdoors.

For those still seeking to get a pet bird, they should adopt instead of shop.

More fundamentally, according to Paxton, the investigator, avowed animal lovers can channel that love into more altruistic endeavors.

“If you want to buy a bird as a pet, the first thing I would say is, ‘I love that you love animals, that’s fantastic,’” he says in his investigation video. “But since you love animals, do something that’s going to help them…you could volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary, or at a bird rescue. You can do something so at the end of the day, you know you have been part of the solution.”