And the photo was just food for thought. You're free to interpret it any way.
In all seriousness: I owned two birds growing up, both were cockatiels.
This little shit is named Teake, and he's still alive after 22 years. He can't fly anymore, but he can recognize me whenever I visit my dad and is comfortable around me, whereas he isn't with strangers. Cockatiels are
social animals, meaning that, and I must stress this, they're evolutionarily programmed to seek a pack mentality with whatever happens to be around. When the other cockatiel (Aaron) was alive, he'd tolerate people for a short amount of time before biting you so he could go back to Aaron's side. Now that Aaron has been dead for over five years, he's mellowed out because there are no other cockatiels, so he's settled on the next best thing in his environment: Humans.
Teake is still dumb as a rock. He tries to fly even though he's been entirely incapable of it for years. Sounds and images coming from a TV, or even a radio, completely fool him whereas it didn't fool my dogs. (ex: If the TV shows images of an eagle and it starts screeching, Teake will duck for cover and start screaming in terror.) He once attempted to land in a pot of boiling water years ago, back when he could fly. I've even seen him repeatedly attempting to nibble on cooked chicken and pieces of pizza, despite being completely incapable of processing meat: Teake is, by every stretch of the imagination, retarded. Far, far beyond human child retarded, we're talking complete full blown idiocy that would result in him likely getting himself killed within a day of not being supervised. Like, any random ole' crow would pick him off, no problem, no contest, and Teake likely wouldn't even see it coming.
Does that make him any less of a pet? No. I still love him, he's still a pet I grew up with all my life.
Does that make it immoral of Australia to
consider them a pest species that overruns their agriculture, which sometimes inspires them to call open season on the little feathery fuckers? No. No it does not. They're nowhere near human-level intelligence or sentience and sometimes, culling them to prevent their population from overrunning human interests such as
farming basic non-meat foodstuffs is a necessary part of civilization.
Keep in mind, that's just slaughtering them and using pesticides to try and discourage them from going near human lands. I could bring up literally dozens of examples, worldwide, of human beings en masse slaughtering wild animals that are considered pest species to prevent them from maiming their own environments (deer) or mercilessly destroying farm crops (gophers). Even my favourite pet animal of all time, the ferret, is considered an environmentally-threatening foreign pest in New Zealand, and breeding them there is considered illegal without special licensing.
We are in every single part of the ecosystem at this point. Ceasing the consumption of meat will not stop mass slaughters and systemic abuses of animals. At the very least, eating them after we kill them is the
rational, human thing to do. It gives their slaughter some meaning.
Make of that what you will, of course. Just figured if we're gonna revive this thread I'll iterate this point one more time.