Why do we sympathize with birds in cages?

Since humans began keeping birds in cages, several centuries have passed. Pet birds have long been defined as "birds for pleasure and profit", singing in confinement for human amusement and utility. This work focuses on the canary as a case study, exploring how pet birds have, within the context of globalisation, traversed continents to become both popular pets and cultural symbols across different historical periods. It examines how these birds, through the process of social modernisation, have formed a kind of involuntary symbiotic relationship with humans.

Through various literary and visual works throughout history, we can trace the development of the canary (and, more broadly, singing songbirds) as part of the pet industry in different regions. These works also reveal the reasons behind the canary’s popularity as a creative subject across time and space. In Europe, the earliest history of pet birds began after the colonisation of the Canary Islands in Africa, which triggered a canary craze. Initially, keeping canaries was a privilege reserved for the clergy and nobility, but the growing demand quickly spurred the development of a transnational bird breeding industry. In early times, breeding began as a domestic craft in European households. Traders and bird-keeping guilds would purchase birds from breeders, grade them based on health and singing ability, and travelling merchants would carry stacked birdcages from village to village for sale.

In the United States, canaries became symbols of the middle class. Their popularity was so widespread that it influenced pop culture—for example, the large yellow bird on Sesame Street originates from the canary's status as a common household pet. The rise of the American canary industry even sparked a bird-keeping trend in Taiwan’s military dependents’ villages in the 1960s. Hearing of the high profits in the U.S., military officers would distribute bird eggs to families, who then raised the birds to be exported in a coordinated effort.

Despite changes across eras, canaries remain the dominant species in the global pet bird market. At the 2025 World Pet Bird Championship, out of around 25,000 birds, about 21,000 were canaries, with the rest being mainly finches and parrots. However, as contemporary animal welfare legislation gains international consensus, the global pet industry is shifting toward the "Global South." In central Europe, keeping birds as pets is increasingly seen as synonymous with animal cruelty. The social symbolism of buying and breeding pet birds is once again being redefined.

The caged bird is watched, desired, and pitied. It becomes an object onto which countless cultural symbols are projected—slave emancipation, the women's movement, environmental protection, social repression, and lack of freedom. The caged bird is often seen as a metaphor for the victim. As perpetrators, we feel guilt, and through artistic creation, we express our remorse and hope. Yet often, the caged bird reminds us of our own condition, our longing for a freer life.

In this contemporary context, as an artist, I want to use the global political-economic-historical context combined with cultural research to reconsider the human-animal relationship: from "Regarding the pain of others" to "you are not a fish, how do you know the joy of fish?" How can cross-species empathy be possible? Under the current state of the pet industry, countless generations of bred pet birds have no possibility of returning to the wild. The emotional bond between humans and birds is more abstract, short-lived, and fragile than with mammalian pets like cats and dogs. Yet across generations, the human desire to approach, possess, and control nature remains. Through this work, I hope to reexamine the reasons and meaning behind keeping pet birds, and at a time when the pet bird industry is in decline, to use “staring” and “listening” as methods to understand the canary anew, to explore what an ideal symbiotic relationship in the future could be.