Nothing worse than someone who feels the need to mind everyone else's business. I was at a show yesterday & there was a small sale area. A young woman had a few ducks in a pen & they did not have any water. Some busybody complained to the people running the show & threatened to complain to the facility that was hosting the show.
It was a cool day & the ducks weren't going to be there for more than 4 hours. Being without water for that brief a period wasn't going to hurt them at all. No living creature needs access to food & water around the clock. Adult birds are shipped w/o water & may be in transit for a couple of days. They arrive alive & well.
The notion that going w/o water for a few hours is harmful is just a product of ignorance.
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Depending on how big the auction was, I doubt his poor condition would have been caused by having no water while in a sale box. Since the boxes are tipped around a bit at an auction, theres no way I would be able to keep the water from spilling and making a mess of the bird I am trying to sell. His poor condition was probably from wherever he came from before the auction.
Many people catch birds the night before a sale, so it ends up being a lot longer than a couple of hours without water. While a person has a choice about drinking or not, the birds cannot choose, but any time I pour water in the cups, at least one comes over to have a drink. Water runs off their feathers, and even a whole cup is not going to wet them significantly.
Another issue is cages without bedding. I can't count how many times I have seen chickens with injured toes in cages because no one bothered to put bedding in. Let's just try to do the best we can for our birds.
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Let's take the heat out of this and have a rational conversation.
If you see someone who has birds that you think are in distress then speak with them. Approach them in a reasonable manner and you are more likely to get a reasonable response in return.
If you were set up next to me at the Dunnellon swap then you should have noticed the quart size yogurt cups wired into the cage corners. There were two in each cage. One had water, the other feed. I don't always take feed, but that particular swap I did. I even set up my canopy off of the asphalt specifically so that the birds would be cooler.
Until the last hour or so of that swap however it was not hot that day. In fact it was the coolest weather we've had for a swap since last spring as many of us noted.
As far as tying the bird's legs together it's not an uncommon practice for folks who did not have a cage or large box to carry their birds home. Again if you were set up next to me you could have heard me discuss with the buyers how far they had to go before they reached their home and where in their vehicle they would be carrying their birds. A relative few miles in the floorboards of their trucks are not going to over heat them since the buyers would be in the cab with them. I used that caution tape specifically because it's wide enough not to cut off their circulation. Every customer also gets one of my business cards in case they need help later. I have no doubt I'd have heard about it if they'd gotten home to discover they had a dead or injured bird.
Start with a reasonable tone from the get-go and you'll be much more likely to get a reasonable response.
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Depending on how big the auction was, I doubt his poor condition would have been caused by having no water while in a sale box. Since the boxes are tipped around a bit at an auction, theres no way I would be able to keep the water from spilling and making a mess of the bird I am trying to sell. His poor condition was probably from wherever he came from before the auction.
Many people catch birds the night before a sale, so it ends up being a lot longer than a couple of hours without water. While a person has a choice about drinking or not, the birds cannot choose, but any time I pour water in the cups, at least one comes over to have a drink. Water runs off their feathers, and even a whole cup is not going to wet them significantly.
Another issue is cages without bedding. I can't count how many times I have seen chickens with injured toes in cages because no one bothered to put bedding in. Let's just try to do the best we can for our birds.
I use cardboard boxes which would fall apart if they got soaken wet. The boxes at auctions are not very large so the birds would be sitting in water and wet shavings until they got to their new home.
I catch my birds the night before, box them and take them in the morning. It would be about 24 hours at the most that they would be without water.