As a parrot breeder, companion and researcher, I can unequivocally say that I have been keeping a secret, a powerful secret that, once revealed, will change the way that humans view themselves and their place in the world, especially in relation to parrots. This morning, a reader, Sara, pointed out to me in an email that this secret has been revealed at long last.
As described at McSweeney's in this recently published open letter to The Amazon Parrot I Have Been Supporting For Over 15 Years Who Still Tries To Bite Me For No Apparent Reason, parrots are much more intelligent than we give them credit for;
[...] Recent scientific research has finally exposed your perfidious avian secret: Several parrots have been proven to understand and speak perfect English. As a result, we now know that your species has self-awareness, awareness of the feelings of others, and a heretofore unimagined intelligence. Unimagined by me, anyway, since you never indicated by word (ha-ha!) or deed that you possessed anything more than the simple self-seeking cognition of a lower animal, like, say, a cat. I actually felt sorry for you and your tiny bird brain.
So intelligent, in fact, that parrots are known to make plans and have successfully subverted humans and their technologies to fulfill the parrots' own purposes;
[...] You kept your cognitive and language abilities to yourself, forcing me to guess frantically at what you wanted, and shrieked like a nuclear warning siren whenever I couldn't somehow psychically pick up on the exact nature of your request. It is now obvious that you are quite the little intellectual, and that your species isn't afraid to use our human technology for your own ends. Now that I have read about your fellow parrots' ability to operate a computer so it will show only the pictures they prefer (pictures of themselves, of course), I think I have figured out just how my new laptop got infected with a mysterious virus that destroyed the hard drive.
So those of you who live with parrots and other birds, a warning; do be careful. A destroyed hard drive is not the only mischief that these creatures are capable of committing in their quest to change the world to meet their own needs and desires.
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June must be parrot month... Earlier this month, I traveled to San Fransisco and saw the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill.
When I returned home I watched the movie "Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill". Now this!
I hope a destroyed hard drive doesn't happen to you.
yeah, me too!
Hey, so you did see that email after all. ;) Best of all, that series is titled "Open letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond"... some of the other 'letters' are equally hilarious.
I think it's disgusting for anyone to breed anything that they don't intend to eat. If they are going to eat it, then they need to treat it with care and respect until then.
The way birds (and most animals) are treated when they are bred and kept in captivity is horrible. Breeding birds is a horrible practise tha needs to stop. No more cages. No more clipped wings.
I think its disgusting to see self-righteous commenters espousing views that don't make any sense. So, we should keep an animal comfortable until we kill it, butcher it, strip it of its muscles, and devour it? Now, thats certainly civilized! Or, perhaps (gasp! Oh the horror!) we might actually live in harmony with another non-human being and treat it as a companion that will never have to worry about the exact thing that you wish to do to it. Breeding birds has been the savior of many nearly extinct species, and has resulted in the cessation of wild-trapping for pets, which was truly cruel. Most cages are freaking parrot-palaces that are substantially larger than the small hole in a tree that they would live in anyway. And not all people clip their birds' wings. I am certainly happy to let my once-endangered African Grey parrot fly around the room as he chatters happily and then eats fruit out of my hand. Wow, he sure is oppressed.