My 22 year old Double Yellow Headed Amazon Parrot is healthy, vetted, chipped, and no risk to Australia. She was handraised, never set outside, and is living with my parents who are growing quite elderly in NYC.  I married an Australian. Australia made me choose between keeping my parrot daughter and marrying my husband. I chose to move to Australia because there was talk that domestic birds from the states would be eventually allowed into Australia sooner than later, and my parents agreed to take her in until this happened, but this has been five years of bureaucracy. I have now been told that they are only considering Yellow Crested Amazons from America, not Yellow Headed Amazons and that I should make plans to adopt her out.

Parrots are like five-year-old children. They are telling me to adopt out my five-year-old daughter who sings opera and loves music and who has a beautiful operatic vibrato and rich low notes. She can sing all of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and she lives to hear my operatic singers rehearse. Elizabeth is emotionally attached to me and starts crying during my phonecalls to New York when my mother puts me on speaker phone. When she cries, she cries like a baby. She picked it up from my human daughter when she was little. She knows what weeping means, and she does it when she is upset. It is cruel and devastating to me and my family.

Blood tests can determine any sort of pathogens in imported birds. There is 0 risk of posing problems for Australia by letting in my parrot to live out her days here with her mother, in captivity. This is arbitrary cruelty. Please sign this petition so that Elizabeth can come home to live with her mother where she belongs.

Americans are supposed to be allies of Australia, but we are not treated very well. This has been so devastating and damaging to me mentally and to my family. It hurts my parents that they are getting too infirm to take care of her. My mother is begging for me to try to bring her here with me. She is getting up in age and it is a lot to take care of a parrot. Liz has all of her meals cooked for her. I have made her breakfast, lunch, and dinner her whole life, and my mother has been doing it since I moved here. Parrots can live 80 years. Must I leave my husband and my home so as not to abandon my companion bird? Why must my family be broken? Please sign this petition so that my baby girl can come home and not be sent to live with strangers, wondering the rest of her life what she did to be abandoned. I cannot imagine Elizabeth in some cage somewhere spending her days waiting for her dirty water bowl to be changed in some dark room. It would be like putting her in prison. Australia is making me do this and I hate it. It is breaking my heart.