By Barry Kent MacKay
In mid-May, 1967, my mother, the late Phylis E. MacKay, and I encountered a horrific situation in a local pet store. We were trying to document the largely unregulated flow of exotic animals into the commercial pet trade, with the hope of stopping its most egregious excesses. In those days you could order a vast range of animals from price lists, directly from the forests of distant, tropical countries. Pet owners chose whatever animals appealed to them based entirely on their names, with not the slightest knowledge of what the animals even ate. We had to feign indifference to the suffering, and presented my interest as an artist who required fresh dead birds to be preserved as specimens for my artwork.
A shipment had just come in from Thailand, and we were invited to help open the boxes, cardboard containers with screen mesh openings. I particularly remember ones filled with tiny sunbirds and flowerpeckers. There was a mush at the bottom of the boxes that were all that remained of those who had died early, with fresher dead birds on top of that, and sick, fluffed up birds on top of that, being excreted on by those healthy enough to sit on thin doweling perches above that.
In one container there was a freshly dead Red-billed Blue Magpie, that I preserved, but only now have I gotten around to portraying him. The experience, and many similarly sad encounters with the animal victims of the exotic pet industry, pushed me ever deeper into conservation and animal welfare work that continues to this day.
Barry Kent MacKay is a bird artist and illustrator. Learn more about him and his work, please visit: barry-mackay.pixels.com; fineartamerica.com/profiles/barry-mackay. He can be emailed at mimus@sympatico.ca.