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Two hotels located at The Island in Pigeon Forge—Margaritaville Island Hotel and Margaritaville Island Inn—and the nearby Courtyard Pigeon Forge in Tennessee have been profiting off animal suffering. Margaritaville Island Hotel and Margaritaville Island Inn allow patrons to handle parrots for photo ops. Parrots are highly social, complex, and intelligent. Forcing them to endure the large, noisy crowds common to hotels can cause them extreme stress. Photo ops and other encounters with any wild animals, including parrots, are reckless, dangerous, and cruel.
Courtyard Pigeon Forge keeps an Amazon parrot named LuLu in solitary confinement inside a tiny cage in its lobby. Amazon parrots live in large social groups in nature, but this hotel denies LuLu the opportunity to have the company of her own species, which deprives her of the innate need for social interactions with other birds. Frustration and loneliness resulting from tiny cages and solitary confinement often leads birds to engage in aggressive and self-destructive behaviors, including pulling out their own feathers and mutilating their own skin.
The birds exploited at these hotels are reportedly from Parrot Mountain, a roadside zoo in Pigeon Forge, which also breeds and sells birds. It confines social species of parrots to small, solitary perches without anything to do and clips their wings to prevent flight or confines them to cramped, barren cages. Hindering flight denies birds the expression of one of their most fundamental and natural physical and behavioral needs. These birds are deprived of everything that’s natural and important to them.
Please urge these Pigeon Forge hotels to reconsider their relationship with Parrot Mountain and to avoid exhibiting parrots or any other wild animals.