Five Years with Mister Buddy, and a Hard Choice About Giving
A long-term Mickaboo donor and adopter announced they would no longer support Mickaboo financially. This is their email to Mickaboo’s discuss list.
Today is the fifth anniversary of our beloved Mister Buddy’s gotcha day. Starting with that first day and annually on this date ever since I have donated $1000 to Mickaboo in appreciation for the privilege of being able to love and care for this miracle of nature.
After much thought, I’ve decided to set this year’s funds aside for now.
The nonprofit world is fraught….always. Reasonable people disagree, passions run high, schisms form among longtime friends. Leaders lose site of mission statements; volunteers are unable to maintain standards; and there may be no right or wrong answers if truly existential problems crop up. I believe this is the case regarding the expenditure of significant sums to sustain wild birds in life in captivity.
What is the meaning of life? Who decides? What is the value of a bird’s life? We can only have our own beliefs. There is no ultimate arbiter.
For myself, I am very clear and have strong personal feelings on this issue. Others will most certainly disagree. Nature is cruel. Bodies are imperfect and fragile. While no, I would not like to be the one to euthanize a bird, I will euthanize myself when I believe the time is right. (And with a family history of dementia, this is not hypothetical.)
The extension of this is that I cannot abide spending tens of thousands of dollars to confine wild birds in perpetuity in a veterinary hospital which, to me, is cruel.
If Mickaboo decides to abandon this practice, I will happily reinstate my giving….despite other organizational problems that may need to be resolved. If not, I will direct my gotcha day donations to the Cornell Lab. My strong preference is to be lifelong supporter of this organization.
Leadership’s Response: When ‘Because We Say So’ Is the Only Answer
Sarah Lemarie issued a lengthy response (over 1,500 words) reiterating the same arguments she has previously used to defend Mickaboo’s actions. Rather than reproducing the full text, we have provided a summary below.
Sarah reflects on an exhausting but rewarding rescue of 260 zebra finches (which we will address in an upcoming post), emphasizing teamwork and the value of learning to appreciate different species. She then turns to defending Mickaboo’s decision to keep wild conures at For the Birds, repeating the same justifications leadership has used all along to refute concerns. She insists the birds are thriving, but offers no evidence beyond “it’s that way because we say it is.” While accusing critics of being personal and emotional, Sarah leans heavily on her own personal anecdotes, emotional appeals, and loyalty-based arguments to make her case.
She contends that medical records may appear alarming only because they are required to document every potential concern, and that in practice the birds are stable, active, and benefiting from proximity to veterinary care. She rejects the allegation that Mickaboo is unethically “keeping birds alive,” characterizing such claims as both misleading and malicious. She further insists that no one benefits financially from the arrangement and cites the case of the wild conure Dublin as evidence of positive outcomes.
What she omits, however, is that Dublin was a baby when he was found, unable to fly due to injury—not a victim of bromethalin poisoning, and not ill or chronically compromised. In fact, Dr. Van Sant’s March 2024 email notes that Dublin was ready for release. His tameness is therefore unsurprising; a young bird raised in captivity naturally becomes accustomed to human contact. This has little relevance to the sick conures at the center of the current debate. What it does illustrate, however, is a far deeper ethical breach: more than $20,000 was spent to transform a wild, releasable bird into a pet, an outcome that contradicts both rescue principles and basic respect for wildlife.
Sarah maintains that Mickaboo has clear policies that prioritize quality of life, already shared with the press, and frames the debate as one of values: critics want to “give up” on the birds while Mickaboo refuses to. She closes by insisting the parrots poisoned by humans deserve continued care, even if imperfect, and that all captive parrots live in compromise. Yet the pattern remains the same—criticisms are brushed aside with assertions rather than evidence, while critics are discredited as malicious or misled.