https://www.teflon.com/en/consumers/teflon-coatings-cookware...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_fume_fever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluoroisobutene
Although acutely toxic, this substance is not a persistent "forever chemical" because there are multiple mechanisms that rapidly degrade it in the environment:
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Perfluoroisobutyle...
> Perfluoroisobutene is quite toxic with an LCt = 880 mg⋅min⋅m−3 (mice).[1] It is a Schedule 2 substance of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
I don't know about you but I try and keep my ricin away from my breakfast foods. It is however reassuring that it'll be degraded in the environment.
To cause Teflon to degrade you have to heat the pan to over 500F / 260C.
No one cooks at those temperatures, even ovens don't go so high. You basically have to forget the pan on a high flame for a long time.
And the toxic chemicals you get from overheating oil are far worse, somehow everyone forgets about those.
And plenty of recipes are cooked at 450 degrees. I don't even believe there's a full-sized (i.e. not a toaster) oven that doesn't go to 500 degrees, but I'm willing to be corrected.
Still, I like cooking on teflon.
I’d say it’s pretty easy to get teflon to degrade at home.
That said, pyrolysis of fluorinated compounds does release very toxic substances, HF among one of them. On the other hand, the tradeoff is that below those temperatures at which they start degrading, they are extremely inert.
On top of that you have to heat the Teflon over 500F / 260C, and ovens temperatures don't go so high (except in self cleaning but a non-stick oven would not have self cleaning).
I suspect something else happened to your birds - probably simple smoke from food residue, which kills birds much easier than overheated Teflon does.
I don't know whether they're being intellectually dishonest, or genuinely don't realize they're spreading useless info.
They're claim that nobody gets a pan hot enough to degrade teflon while cooking is slightly more reasonable, except plenty of recipes start with "heat an empty, dry pan until it is searing hot" and that leaves a lot of room to screw up your pan.
So if you had been using oil with your pan the birds would have still died, and earlier than they did with the Teflon.
edit: I know for a fact that these birds smelled a lot of food cooking and lived. Teflon killed them in the next room.
edit2: I should really bow out of this discussion. The fact that Teflon.com thinks that Teflon is a special worry if you have birds is enough for me. Judging by the content of their page on the subject, I'm going to assume that they decided that comparisons to burning mystery oils were spurious.
When the product itself is actually publicly fessing up to being acutely toxic in some way, it’s a pretty safe bet it is.
There’s no reason to doubt the account here of the birds dying and this being the likely cause.
How long ago was this? I'm guessing that the relevant knowledge maybe still isn't widespread.