Description:This parrot was living inside a converted cupboard in solitary confinement in a UK pet shop.
After other welfare issues were spotted and complaints made their licence was revoked. These birds can live for around 70 years, they are often passed around for various reasons, and have many captive caused behavioural issues.
This species has been made extinct in certain native areas they once lived, because of the pet trade. The northern subspecies (Ara macao cyanoptera) has been utterly decimated by decades of poaching and habitat fragmentation.
This subspecies is effectively extinct across most of El Salvador. Only tiny, fractured populations survive—such as fewer than 250 birds in Guatemala and isolated groups in Belize and southern Mexico. This matters because we are still fuelling the trade by even allowing captive bred birds to be kept as ‘pets’. This drives the illegal trade to obtain more birds.
