We recently sent out a newsletter response to Mickaboo’s August newsletter. We’re posting it here.

Looking Past the Spin

Mickaboo’s August 2025 newsletter repeats the same rhetoric, falsehoods and we’ve already addressed, and we’ll continue to answer them as long as they keep resurfacing. It starts with an invocation of Mickaboo’s origin story. However, the organization’s history and mission are not in dispute. The issue is how its values are being applied today. Claiming “reverence for life” has too often justified prolonging the suffering of sick birds in costly clinical boarding, while many healthy parrots wait for homes.

Leadership’s claim to follow a “no-kill” philosophy is misleading. In practice, it has meant years of repeated treatments at a single for-profit clinic, not the permanent homes for healthy animals that no-kill shelters are known for. True compassion sometimes requires recognizing when intervention causes more harm than good.

Accusing former volunteers of “spamming” donors is a distraction. The concerns we raise are evidence-based and focused on governance and animal welfare, matters the public has every right to know.

The statistics Leadership presents also highlight the problem. Hundreds of birds (including many of the ones they cite) remain in foster care for months or years, while resources are concentrated on a small percentage of cases. Adoption numbers (112 birds) are inflated by budgies and finches, which are usually only adopted or fostered out in multiples of two or more. Only about forty parrots of other species were adopted, many by their current foster homes.

Mickaboo points to the numbers as if all is well, but the truth is that a significant portion of this success came from the two terminated volunteers who facilitated many of those placements and spearheaded other key projects. Despite leadership’s claim to the contrary, positions are not being filled in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, long-time volunteers continue to leave.

It is also worth noting that Mickaboo’s budgie team is one of the most effective groups of coordinators the organization has. They are consistently on top of their work, which is another reason why budgies account for a disproportionate share of successful adoptions. This is less a sign of overall health than of a few dedicated coordinators doing outstanding work despite leadership’s failings. But there are far more budgies in foster care than are currently being adopted out, and more are brought in all the time. This is true for other bird species, as well.

The other “accomplishments” leadership touts are also misleading. The server upgrade appears to have been, yet again, a stopgap fix using updated, though still outdated, equipment, despite funding approved for a new server more than a year earlier. They boast that they’ve restarted an initiative to place the Basic Bird Care Class online. However, an online class was developed and made ready to launch by the two expelled volunteers, who had begun to work on it in August of ’24 after four years of inaction by Mickaboo leadership. Leadership wants you to believe that mishandling the class is the main reason the volunteers were let go. However, this is also misdirection. See our blog post here.

Finally, Mickaboo continues to praise its “extremely skilled avian vet,” who, in this context, helped save Captain Jack. They have called her an avian specialist, which is also not true. If they continue with this narrative, we will be releasing a detailed blog post explaining why this is a gross mischaracterization.

The support letters from other veterinarians are another distraction and irrelevant to the matter at hand. We know Mickaboo has done good work over the years. We are not questioning that. We are questioning specific problems that we’ve outlined again and again. Furthermore, the authors of the letters have professional ties to Mickaboo and none of them explicitly endorse the massive spending at For the Birds or the practice of institutionalizing birds there. One wonders what the veterinarians Mickaboo bans its fosters and adopters from using would say about them.

More Record Straightening

Once again, Leadership misrepresents the SF Chronicle Article. The Chronicle story was not about demanding euthanasia for Billy and the other sick wild conures, but about raising the larger question of what quality of life means for the animals kept at For the Birds. Mickaboo presents permanent captivity and ongoing treatments as a “humane alternative,” yet these birds remain confined to clinical boarding for years, undergoing repeated procedures that preserve life without resolving their illnesses or allowing them to return to the wild.

Mickaboo claims that Billy and other wild conures “relish life,” but this ignores the more troubling facts. A parrot’s wellbeing cannot be measured only by whether it vocalizes at normal times or eats oranges. True welfare means allowing a bird to live as close as possible to its natural life, not keeping it permanently dependent on intensive human medical management. It also doesn’t take into account the phenomenon of learned helplessness, which is when an animal subjected to prolonged stress or captivity stops resisting its conditions, appearing calm or compliant while in reality its natural instincts have been suppressed. For parrots, this can look like acceptance, but in truth it reflects the erosion of their autonomy and spirit.

Finally, while it’s true the Chronicle reporter canceled her April visit to For the Birds, what Mickaboo leaves out is that when she tried to reschedule, she was refused access. The suggestion that she only made a “last-minute attempt” before publication is misleading — it was FTB that chose not to allow the follow-up visit.

As for the Chronicle not labeling Melaine and Vincent whistleblowers, that was a legal decision, not a reflection of the facts. News outlets often avoid that language because it implies a legal judgment. The reality is that we are whistleblowers: we exposed serious ethical and financial concerns about the organization, and our actions fall under whistleblower protection laws. Mickaboo’s attempt to use the Chronicle’s editorial caution to deny that status is another way of dismissing valid concerns instead of addressing them.