After thinking about this whole topic, I don't like it either...And it has NOTHING to do with my neighbors or the neighborhood I live in...State College is fairly crime-free anyway, it's only considered a city because of Penn State and it's over 100,000 students...And I live in a nice neighborhood with nice houses, cul-de-sacs, and mostly couples with kids, and lots of pets, mostly dogs and cats.So I'm not at all worried about my neighbors knowing I have parrots...
That being said, unless you live in a "Gated-Community", where you can't get in without going through a security gate, etc., then that means that literally ANYONE can drive around your neighborhood looking for things to steal, and that's exactly what they do. There are many, many people who actually make their living (a nice ones at that) by driving around neighborhoods every day and stealing anything and everything that isn't welded-down...why? Because now it's possible to sell anything and everything online and sell it quickly for quick money. eBay, Etsy, Craigslist, LetGo, Hoobly, Kijiji, it's endless. And the people buying don't typically care where it comes from or who it belongs to...There are actually "Theft-Rings" that go around stealing pure-bred dogs and selling them in areas away from where they were stolen from. Pets are BIG MONEY right now, anything from pure-bred dogs to parrots to exotic pets like Chinchillas, Sugar Gliders, Hedgehogs, Ferrets, Primates like Monkeys and Lemurs, etc.
I think the reason that I would be afraid to advertise to anyone and everyone who is able to just drive past my house that I have at least one parrot inside is because of the number of parrots that I see pass through the Rescue that were purchased by their owners on Craigslist. It's endless. And generally the owners don't know a thing about their bird's history, only that it was re-homed on Craigslist. Usually they don't even know the names of the people who they bought their parrots from! They usually see the ad on Craigslist, they email the people through the Craigslist email-server (so they don't even know the people's real email address or phone number), and they meet the people in some neutral location...Half the time they don't even see what type of vehicle the people were driving because they meet them inside of a McDonald's or a Walmart with the bird and never see their car. They meet the bird, fall in love with the bird instantly, get whatever history they can from the owners, and they make a decision on the spot to buy the bird. So they hand them the cash, they hand them the bird inside of it's cage (sometimes), and that's it...Then a few months later after the bird has bitten everyone anytime they've gone near it and they realize that what they were told about the bird isn't true, they end-up surrendering the bird to the Rescue...
We've actually had birds surrendered to the Rescue on more than a few occasions where someone comes rushing in after seeing them on the website, screaming and crying about how it's their bird that was stolen months or even years prior, and they bring all kinds of proof with them: photos of them with the bird, photos of the bird when it was a baby, hatch certificates, receipts from the breeder they bought the bird from, Vet records, etc. It's really horrible when that happens because 9 times out of 10 we call the police and give them the personal information of the people who surrendered or "found" the bird outside somewhere, and it's all fake except for the copy of their License or ID card, which is also sometimes not even real...The worst was Blue-Fronted Amazon who had been stolen while being boarded at a Veterinary Office while the owner was on vacation...The owner saw him on our website and called us immediately, and then they called the police because they lived over 4 hours away from us...So we turned-over all of the information about the person who surrendered the bird, only to find that they had purchased the bird a year prior to surrendering him to us from a guy in Philadelphia who had been convicted of theft multiple times prior for stealing multiple pure-bred dogs (he had gotten nailed multiple times because the dogs he was stealing from people's yards were microchipped, and he didn't have them checked, he just sold them)...The poor guy who surrendered the bird to us was scared to death that he was going to be arrested for stealing the bird from the Vet office over 4 hours from State College in a town he had never even been in...He felt awful, he had owned the bird for a year trying to bond with it and get it to get along with his other Amazon, and he just felt awful that it had been stolen from someone...
With the internet today and it's many resources for selling pets for a very quick yet large amount of money, it's scary. It's definitely not your neighbors you need to worry about, it's everyone else...I don't know why, I'm only 39, but it seems like people in this day and age just have absolutely no scruples or conscience at all...It's all about money and nothing else...
Now I sound like my grandmother...
You have to pass it within arms reach to go in and out.
