I want to apologize ahead of time. My feelings on this issue are pretty strong. I am not trying to start any sort of argument at all, just trying to express my views on this sort of thing from my perspective as someone who's been involved in animal rescue her whole life. I do not think everyone has to feel or think this way, this is all me!
If Voren isn't breeding FOR those color mutations and they're just happening, that's one thing, but I really can't support someone who is breeding for those mutations specifically. I've just dealt with too many unwanted animals (and the WEAK excuses people have for abandoning them) to be able to swallow 'new' ones that are specific to the pet trade. Yes, we did this to dogs and cats and now have a ton of different breeds (and overcrowded shelters). But just because it was done in the past doesn't mean it needs to continue today when we should be smarter than this given the desperate situation in shelters across the US. We don't need 'labradoodles' or 'cockapoos' we have enough dogs and cats in the world! Slavery, debtors' prisons, and child labor used to be the status quo too, but we learn and grow as a species (hopefully) and stop doing things that are detrimental to society and life in general as we get smarter.
I think the birds are gorgeous (the blue variety is truly breathtaking!) and I have no doubt that breeder knows an insane amount about Amazons, likely more than I ever will, but it's not anything I can support and still sleep at night myself. Unless, as I mentioned, the mutations are just happening every so often in the occasional clutch and he's not breeding for them. Mutations are a part of nature, they occasionally occur and sometimes the mutation even becomes the norm, but just because it happens sometimes in nature doesn't mean it needs to happen on purpose in the pet trade. We humans have this ridiculous idea that we can muck about with nature and it's no big deal, but every time we've tried it's backfired on us (look at all the purebred dogs and cats in shelters right now for a prime example or at all the factory farming and the results of that or the cane toads in Australia or take your pick, examples are everywhere). The shelter I volunteer with has around 50 birds at any given time and they're constantly turning away birds because they're out of room. Out of those 50 there's around a dozen that are just your plain, garden variety, naturally occurring Amazon parrot. That's 50 birds that had a home and lost it and need one now. 50 birds without a home and countless others that have to be turned away for lack of space and resources. And that's just in my tiny little area of the world. One of the birds in the shelter is a catalina macaw and thinking of more hybrids coming into the shelter/rescue community just makes me sad when we are turning away non-hybrids left and right because there's already no where for them to go.
I cant really see any difference with interbreeding Amazons as people do with Conures and IRN, where their are many different colour mutations!!
