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neglected situation, will make treatment useless.
Captivity stress is a complex group of situations, each individually or collectively acting to impinge on the physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing of the animal. It applies to wildlife species especially, as well as the many poorly or impossibly domesticated species kept as exotic pets. To a great extent this also encompasses pet birds, which have as many cage-related and behavioral psychoses as any crazed primate in a bad zoo. Captivity stress can include too small of a cage, not getting out of the cage, inadequate or inappropriate toys, and uninteresting things to do inside the cage. Improper ambient temperatures, humidity, or day/night length are major obstacles. So are inadequate amounts of full spectrum light wave irradiation as well as fresh air. Habitat accommodations such as substrates, perch sizes and types, cage cleanliness, food and water hygiene, and inadequate provisions for exercise are all important factors. Crowded conditions, toxins in the environment/or of the real world free ranging habitat, or being a prey species within ear shot, line of sight, or scent of a predator species in the same facility and not having adequate escape cover are often overlooked.
One cannot ignore the many aspects of human interference, which will make any captive existence stressful. The well-known cartoon artist Gary Larson once drew a picture of a completely frazzled, and self-mutilated, feather picked parrot in a cage. His little old lady caretaker was very sweetly and innocently covering Polly up every night with his blanket cage cover to keep him warm. She said, “Sleep tight Polly!” The cover was bedecked with shapes of lions and tigers and bears, “oh my,” and all with their snarling teeth showing, and claws out! Poor Polly had to look at that scene every night of his crazed psychotic life. I think this illustrates precisely what kind of an obstacle to cure that captivity stress can provide.
It is a little-known clinical pathology fact that many species, especially certain captive avians can develop a chronic fibrotic, sclerotic, dysfunctional liver due to the deposition of amyloid into the tissue. It has been shown repeatedly that the causality and obstacle is captivity stress alone. The severity of liver damage and failure is
proportional to the length of time in captivity. Surely medicines and holistic modalities of many kinds may ameliorate the stress, but it has never been shown yet that the body can overcome the pathology, without first removing the obstacle to the cure, which is simply replacing the animal back into a wild and free state of
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