I’ve had birds for nearly 20 years and there has only really been one accident from flight. My cockatiel lost a chunk of one of his nostrils because he flew close to my ceiling fan. Now I don’t run them at max speed, and my birds know enough to not get close to them.There’s responsible ownership, and then there is the practice that IS cruel – pinioning. I don’t know who the hell is amputating birds around here but I’ve received two adoptees who will never be able to fly.
The first pinioned bird I owned had one normal wing and could fly small distances but eventually grew obese from overeating and perch potato-ing despite having the choice to go outside the cage for most of the day. I currently own a cockatiel who is fully pinioned. If she falls she can land safely. and she can even coast a long distance, but she can’t get back up to the cage without my help. She sticks to the cage at all times, even when her companions are sitting just outside. I believe firmly that if these birds had been allowed the choice of supervised flight and not been treated as a decoration by their previous owners, they might have been less solitary.
You’re right though it really does just depend on the bird’s behavior and getting a feel for what they are going to do on their own. There’s also a large degree of birdproofing like not having toxic plants, securing windows, not leaving your electronics in chewable locations, and not letting them out when you’re cooking.
I still think that clipping wings is a bad practice and I avoid it when possible because from my experience, birds that have the opportunity to fly are happier than those who do not.
And in my completely anecdotal exactly as relevant similar years of experience, when Axi could fly he went into the oven and singed his tail off once, he flew off into a the woods twice when he was startled and ended up stuck in a tree, terrified, we were lucky he didn’t get picked off by a raven or fly off again and get even more lost while my mom tracked down someone to fish him out. And he went into a toilet once.
Plus with clipped wings he was a lot more feral and disobedient. There were things he’d get into when his wings were in need of a clip that he could probably get into even with clipped wings, but he’d only be cocky enough to try when they’d grown out. When we first got him they were clipped and we tried letting them grow out at first, but he was really wild and disobedient when he could get up as high as he wanted. The budgie never had his wings clipped and was basically completely uninterested in people. Whenever you let him out he would just go nuts and get lost or fly into mirrors. The only way to get him back in his cage was to find him by waiting for him to call back to a beeping Power Rangers toy and catch him in a net. My mom also had a childhood experience with a friend whose budgie flew into a mirror and broke his neck, so it’s not an entirely uncommon thing.
So in my experience, my birds were happier, safer, and more sociable when they weren’t flying (or at least not flying unrestrained, a clipped bird can still flutter enough to jump as high as it needs to in a house and get up on chairs and tables), it all depends on the circumstances and the bird, and I would not call it a “bad practice” at all.
I’m sure one could make the argument that if we were better at training birds they could have been bonded sociable family pets while still fully flighted. Some owners can pull that off! But it can take very special circumstances to safely raise fully flighted birds. Clipping the wings doesn’t hurt them, it doesn’t completely take away their ability to fly, it grows back and (in my case at least, if we’re still being anecdotal) it didn’t make the bird unhappy. That’s not what I would call a “bad practice”.
I would love to be able to let my parrots’ feathers grow out. Jamaica, at least, is clearly happier, less anxious, and more sociable when her flight feathers are grown in.
But with the way my house is laid out, the living room is the only room that’s suitable for keeping them, and it opens directly outside. If someone were coming in the door and the birds got startled, they could easily escape and there’s a good chance that—particularly with Jamaica, who is jumpy about being approached at the best of times—I might never get them back.
In that case, keeping their flight feathers clipped is the responsible, safe thing to do for them. The best I can do for now is toe the line of an amount of mobility that’s reasonably satisfying for them but not too risky.
(Also, Lucky is the kind of brat who will get up on high things just because she knows you can’t reach her and there’s nothing you can do about it. And then she decides she’s the boss and starts biting and trying to dictate how the household runs. Some birds…)
For my non-bird owning followers, a bird’s feathers moult and regrow every year. They’re like hair in that they can be trimmed with no pain for the bird, so long as you don’t cut the feathers while they’re growing in. You can trim a varying number of flight feathers to varying lengths to manage how much flight/gliding capability the bird has.
Pinioning, though—maybe whomever’s been doing that will lose a few fingers and we can see how THEY like it.