I composed the following letter to the school and emailed it to the first email address I could find on their site. Hope it does some good!
"Hello Brother Roger
I'm afraid yours was the first email address I could find on the Kellenberg site, so I'm voicing my concerns to you. If a different person is responsible for this matter would you please pass my message on as a matter of urgency?
<snipped the OPs concerns and photo>
I hope you won't consider me presumptuous in alerting Kellenberg to the distress of the animals and asking for a quick remedy to their situation?
Information:
Parrots, and especially cockatoos, are extremely intelligent and sensitive creatures. Just as it would be considered torturous to keep an ape in a crate or a dolphin in a tiny pool, so it is tantamount to torture when a parrot is kept closely confined, unable to stretch its wings and unable to exercise its intellect. Under conditions like this, a bird will quickly go insane and begin to pluck out its own feathers and even mutilate its own flesh. This appears to be the condition of more than one bird kept in or by your school. Saint Francis of Assisi would be faint!
In addition, parrots require fresh water, fresh fruit and vegetables and pellets to provide the vitamins and minerals impossible to acquire in captivity. Parrots, being sensitive souls, are also far better off in a quiet environment where they can have refuge from noise and activity. This could mean a quiet room where respite can be had for a few hours each day or a flight aviary large enough to allow for a refuge place at a distance from the public. Assuming all of the above factors are in place, then all a parrot needs on a daily basis is a great deal of human or avian interaction. They are, by nature, gregarious birds and to isolate them is, again, a form of torture.
I don't know how long these birds have been housed at your school, but I would like to strongly suggest that a school environment is absolutely NOT the place for living, breathing creatures to spend their lives. The hubbub of daily school life would be far more than distressing to birds and the isolation during weekends would be likewise, a cruelty. Again, I would ask you to consider Saint Francis and his sermon to the birds - these animals deserve much better than the lot they seem to have drawn.
Thank you for reading this email and I very much hope it will be received in the spirit in which it was intended: to inform and advise rather than to criticise. Since I'm rather a long way away, I can't help in person, but I'm sure members of my parrot-keepers' group would be willing to do so. The birds need, at the very least, to be rehomed in private residences where good caging, diet and stimulation can be possible. Surely a school the size of Kellenberg would contain families willing to take on the lifetime commitment of helping a parrot in need?
My very best regards to you,
Betrisher
Newcastle, Australia
