An animal cruelty investigator toured several “bird mills,” large-scale operations that breed parrots for the pet retail market, and found unhygienic and inhumane conditions. | World Animal Protection/SEED

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.

Key takeaways

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.

Inside the bird mill

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........

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