Birds
If Animals Could Talk….
Today is National Pet Fire Safety Day
The Parrot Lady of Canada
This parrot sanctuary needs a new champion.
Cosmo Talks: Forget What we’ve Been Taught; It All Comes Down to Instinct
Yesterday Cosmo scared me by disappearing, for a while.
Cosmo is the chatty female African grey parrot who lives in my house — with me, my dogs Mary and Kaylee, a nameless uninvited mouse, and a few nameless uninvited flying squirrels.
As the song goes, “We are fam-i-ly!”
I was at “Betty Jean’s desk” writing last week’s column, when I heard a crash somewhere in the house.
I jumped up from my computer and went in search of Cosmo. I looked in her room, where the shredded remains of a catalogue littered the floor; in my bedroom, where the shredded remains of a cardboard box littered the floor; in the laundry room, where puddles of water spotted the floor; and in the kitchen, where all the cabinet doors were open. But I didn’t find her.
I felt like I was following Hansel and Gretel.
Usually, when she’s done something bad, Cosmo mutters, “No, no, bad bird,” or, in a low voice, “Cosmoooooo.” If she knows I’m looking for her, she calls out, “Here I am!”
I re-searched the house, opening every closet, every cabinet door. Finally, when I opened the cabinet door in my guest bathroom, I found her. She was perched atop the wastebasket being very still. Apparently, after she’d opened the cabinet door and climbed up on the wastebasket, the door had shut behind her, leaving her imprisoned in the dark. Since most birds, other than owls, stay quiet in the dark, Cosmo hadn’t uttered a sound.
When I pulled her out, Cosmo said, “Hello,” as if nothing untoward had happened. I kissed her.
In the wild, it’s not advantageous for birds to utter a sound after dark. They don’t want to alert nocturnal predators, such as owls, to their roost.
The incident caused me to ponder the force of instinct, which we humans think we’ve controlled in our own species. Cosmo surely heard me calling her name as I went through the house. Her culture, which she’s acquired from me, must have made her want to respond, “I’m here!” — but her instinct made her stay quiet.
African grey parrots are not domesticated like dogs and cats. Our dogs and cats have descended from thousands of generations of dogs and cats bred to live with us humans and to serve us. Dogs are our best friends because we created them to love us.
Not so with our dear pet parrots, who have descended from thousands of generations of wild birds. Most of the greys we know had grandparents who flew through African rain forests, lived in large flocks, roosted in tall palms, ate palm nuts, berries, fruits, and seeds, and kept silent after nightfall.
Humans trapped Cosmo’s grandparents and sold them to bird traders, who sold them to an aviary, who bred them for parrot-lovers, like me. When I think about how Cosmo’s ancestors suffered for the pleasure of parrot-lovers, like me, I feel bad.
Cosmo never knew the wild, so she does not miss the rain forest. But however tame she has become, she still has the wild in her. Like all pet parrots — tamed but not domesticated — Cosmo would quickly revert to her wild nature if she did not have constant attention, care, and love.
By the way, in 2007, BirdLife International placed the African grey parrot on the IUCN Red List of Near Threatened Species. The IUCN — the International Union for Conservation of Nature — identifies species at risk for extinction and restricts their trade. The population of African Greys is declining not only because of habitat loss but also because of their capture for trade.
Nobody should ever buy a wild-caught parrot. Not only would he be breaking the law, but he would be guaranteeing an unhappy life for a bird who would always remember the freedom he had lost.
Cosmo is quite tame. She is cultured. But she still interprets anything unusual that happens to her from the standpoint of a wild bird. If I use a dustbuster in her vicinity, she flies off her perch. If I carry a rake through her room on my way to the deck, she growls.
Now she is taking a “shower” in the dogs’ water dish. She’s exclaiming, “Wow, what a bird! Good shower!” And she’s calling, “I’m here! Come here!”
She is calling me not because she’s like a human but because she’s like a wild bird who wants to know where her mate is. She uses English because that’s her means of communicating with me. If I were a bird, she’d chirp.
• Betty Jean Craige is professor emerita of comparative literature at the University of Georgia and the author of many books, including “Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot” (2010). Her email address is bettyjean@cosmotalks.com. Cosmo’s website address is www.cosmotalks.com.
Cosmo Talks: Celebrate the similarities, differences of humans and animals by Betty Jean Craige
Celebrate the similarities, differences of humans and animalsBy Betty Jean Craige
I confess I must say OOPS.
I have spent almost every “Cosmo Talks” column showing how Cosmo’s thinking resembled our own. I wanted to convince you that because non-human animals think and feel like us we should show kindness to them. But I should not have rested my case for kindness to other feathery, furry, and hairy animals on the basis of our similarity.
Ten years ago this month, I bought Cosmo, my African Grey Parrot, from a local pet store. She was just a little chick then, only 6 months old and not yet able to eat on her own.
By her first birthday — I mean, hatchday — Cosmo had uttered her first word, “Bird.” By the age of 3 she had acquired the vocabulary and grammatical tools she would use in her speech from then on. Here is a sample of what she had learned:
“Cosmo is a bird. Hi. Here I am! Here are you? Cosmo wanna go up! Come here! Ow! That hurt? Bad bird — go back! There you are! I love you. Wanna kiss? No! Cosmo wanna cuddle. Time for shower for Cosmo. Wow! Good-bye. B’Jean hafta leave? Stay here! Cosmo wanna go in a car! Cosmo is a birdy. Cosmo has feathers. Birdy has feathers. B’Jean has clothes. We’re gonna have company! Where wanna gonna go? Telephone for bird! Telephone for B’ Jean!
Cosmo is really smart, I marveled, as I kept track of Cosmo’s utterances. She thinks like a human. We animals, human and non-human, have similar thoughts and feelings.
I still believe this.
Actually, Charles Darwin inspired us humans to see our similarities with Earth’s non-human animals when he showed, in the mid-19th century, that we are all related evolutionarily.
Before Darwin, in the Western world, we focused on our differences, especially the difference between humans and beasts, which we considered absolute.
In the 17th century, French philosopher René Descartes described humans in terms of a mind/body dualism. The mind controlled the body, which functioned like a machine. Because only humans had consciousness, only humans could feel pain. Animals could not, Descartes said. They were different from us conscious, sensitive humans. They were like machines.
So to figure out how bodies worked, Descartes dissected live dogs, and gave them no pain-killer. How horrible!
Now we ask: How could Descartes, one of the most powerful intellectuals in history, have been so cruel?
Yet even in the 21st century our thinking about non-human animals shows Descartes’s influence. I wonder how our descendants a hundred years from now will view our experiments on rabbits, mice, and chimpanzees.
Fortunately for Cosmo and her kin, researchers have viewed avian anatomy as too different from human anatomy to merit medical experimentation on birds.
Now that evolutionary biologists are discovering how closely we humans are related genetically to chimpanzees we’re getting laws that protect chimpanzees from us. In fact, we’re getting laws that protect other non-human animals from us. Even skunks. Wow.
However, should we protect only animals that are like us, whose DNA shows a close relationship with us, or whose thought and behavior, like Cosmo’s, resemble our own? Wouldn’t that be like protecting only those humans who looked like us, spoke our language, or worshipped our god?
Cosmo does talk like me, laugh with me, tease me, and deceive me. But she is different from me. She has feathers, a beak, zygodactyl feet and a syrinx. I don’t. She can fly — or she would be able to fly if I hadn’t clipped her flight feathers. I can’t.
I believe that we should be kind to other individuals, of whatever species, not because they’re like us, but because they, like us, are members of Earth’s community of life.
While I’ve been writing this column, for the past two hours, Cosmo has been preening quietly atop the cage behind me. Apparently, she has become impatient with my undivided attention to the computer screen, for she just said, “Cosmo wanna cuddle!”
So for the last 20 minutes Cosmo and I have cuddled. I nuzzle her head. I softly caress her neck, which might give some folks the willies, because feathers don’t feel like hair or fur. I kiss her warm beak, which bears no resemblance to a human mouth or a doggy snout. I cuddle with Cosmo, not because she’s like me but because I want to make her happy. Cuddling makes her happy. And if she’s happy, I’m happy.
• Betty Jean Craige is professor emerita of comparative literature at the University of Georgia and the author of many books, including “Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot” (2010). Her email is bettyjean@cosmotalks.com. Cosmo’s website is www.cosmotalks.com.
Introducing Janice Wolf’s Rocky Ridge Rescue
Enjoy this compilation video of the many different types of animals that Janice Wolf has restored to health and happiness at her Rocky Ridge Refuge in Arkansas.
Mike the African Grey “Kissed a Girl”
Cosmo Talks: Bird climbs to top of pecking order by Betty Jean Craige
I asked Cosmo, “Cosmo wanna go to Betty Jean’s desk?”
Cosmo answered, “Noooo,” and looking at me straight in the eye bit my finger.
“Bad bird! That hurt!” I exclaimed. “Cosmo go back in cage.”
That’s where Cosmo is now, being punished for her bad behavior of five minutes ago. But she’s already forgotten her crime. She’s whistling, playing telephone, laughing, barking and calling to me: “Come here! Cosmo wanna go up! Cosmo wanna be a good bird.” And “Where are you?”
I’m in the study trying to write, but I’ll let her out.
Cosmo, the talkative African grey parrot who lives with me, was asserting her independence from me.
Cosmo asserts her independence in countless ways. In the morning if I ask whether she’d like to “go to kitchen,” she’ll reply, “Noooo! Cosmo don’t wanna go to kitchen.” Then a minute later she’ll waddle out to the kitchen on her own.
At night if I ask her whether she’d like to go to bed, she’ll answer, “Noooo!” Then a few minutes later she’ll say, “Cosmo wanna go to bed, OK?”
Cosmo is insubordinate. For sure.
But I like her insubordination. It shows her self-confidence. Cosmo knows she’s a bird, “a good good bird,” and she’s proud of it.
I don’t want to squash Cosmo’s high opinion of herself. I don’t want to remind her that I have total control over her life, that I rank highest in our household’s hierarchy of power.
For years I taught that in developed countries, long-standing social hierarchies were collapsing. We humans — especially in parts of the world influenced by Aristotle, who 2,500 years ago described nature in terms of a “scale of ascent” — had inherited a habit of ranking. We saw everything in a rank order without realizing that we ourselves were creating the rank order.
We ranked the races and the sexes. We ranked the animals on the basis of their resemblance to us. We ranked humans higher than chimps and gorillas, whom we ranked higher than cows and pigs, whom we ranked higher than mice and gophers, whom we ranked higher than bees and plankton. The lower the animal’s rank the better we felt about eating him, or experimenting on him, or polluting his habitat.
But now, I optimistically told my students, we’re developing a holistic vision in which everybody matters. We consider women as worthy as men. We consider bees and plankton as essential to the biosphere as cuddly animals with cute faces. We see the value of all the parts of a whole — whether it’s a nation, an ecosystem or our global society — because all parts interact with each other to keep the system healthy. We advocate universal human rights, and we appreciate diversity in culture and nature.
I like to think that when we humans no longer equate dominance with our own well-being, we will live more harmoniously with all the Earth’s residents than we do now.
However, the unschooled creatures of our planet don’t share these holistic ideals. Most social animals living in groups — wolves, deer, chickens and household pets — have a dominance order whereby the strongest/smartest individual rules and the others find lower places in the hierarchy.
Before I brought home 6-month-old Cosmo, my four female American Eskimo dogs lived together peacefully in a dominance order they all accepted. Daisy was the alpha dog because she was the largest, strongest, scariest and loudest; she appropriated the chair in my bedroom as her throne. Next came Kaylee, the youngest, who defended herself most fiercely; during the day she lived under the bed out of Daisy’s reach but at night she slept on the bed. (I’m of course referring to my bed.)
Third came Holly, the oldest, who served as the pack’s sentinel, alerting everybody to the many dangers approaching from outside; she slept on the floor by the window. And finally there was Blanche, second largest but most easily intimidated; she bedded down wherever nobody else wanted to be.
Cosmo arrived, and by the time she began speaking she dominated the pack. The four dogs acknowledged her authority and let her be alpha animal. Maybe they thought she was the smartest, or they noticed her big beak, or they respected me and she talked like me.
Now I have only two dogs: Kaylee and Mary. Kaylee rules Mary. Kaylee will block the doggy door, leaving Mary outside to yap indignantly till I let her in. Kaylee will scare Mary away from whatever she wants for herself. Kaylee exercises power over where Mary goes.
But Kaylee lets Cosmo go wherever Cosmo pleases. All Cosmo has to do is walk up to her, and Kaylee moves out of the way to let her pass. No biting, no barking.
•Betty Jean Craige is professor emerita of comparative literature at the University of Georgia and the author of many books, including “Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot” (2010). Her email is bettyjean@cosmotalks.com. Cosmo’s website is www.cosmotalks.com.
Cosmo Talks: Thoughts and Feelings Transcend Categories by Betty Jean Craige
Cosmo has just had her annual physical at Hope Animal Medical Center. Cosmo is not a human, though I’m sure a human would be well treated there. Cosmo is a 10-year-old female African Grey Parrot.
The vet, Dr. Stacy, reported Cosmo’s weight to be 1 pound exactly and declared her health to be excellent. She also said Cosmo’s cloaca was in fine condition.
Dr. Stacy gave Cosmo a general examination, which included a peek at her cloaca, plus a flight-feather clip, a beak trim and a nail trim.
Years ago when she visited the clinic for a nail trim, Cosmo looked up out of the towel in which the vet had wrapped her and said pitifully, “Cosmo wanna be a good bird!”
This time Cosmo had more fun. She met a cat named Creamsicle.
As soon as I carried Cosmo’s cage, with Cosmo inside, into the waiting room, curious Creamsicle approached Cosmo to look her over. Cosmo showed great interest in Creamsicle and barked softly. “Woo woo woo.” Although she was simply greeting Creamsicle, Cosmo startled the little cat, who immediately backed away from the cage. Probably Creamsicle had never seen a bird who barked.
At first I thought Cosmo was playing with Creamsicle, treating her like a dog. But then I realized Cosmo had never seen a cat. Cosmo had learned only three words for the animals in her life: “dog,” “bird,” and “squirrel” — and their variations, “doggy,” “birdies,” etc. She had to fit any animal she encountered into one of those categories.
Cosmo had seen dogs of all kinds and sizes, from a Pekingese named Oscar to a Labrador retriever mix named Shane and a labradoodle named Annie Hall. She calls them all doggies. She had seen multiple varieties of birds, from chickadees to woodpeckers and crows. She had seen squirrels and chipmunks. She had seen humans, whom I guess she categorized as “company.” If she has a separate category for me, she has not disclosed it.
Cosmo fitted Creamsicle into the category of “dog.” Creamsicle had fur, whiskers and a tail, like every dog she knew.
If Cosmo saw a pig, I presume she’d say, “That’s doggy.” I might have my feelings hurt if she said, “That’s company.”
Years ago I started thinking about how we humans structure reality through our language. I had read the book “Language, Thought, and Reality” in which 1930s linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote that Hopi grammar and vocabulary inclined the Hopi Indians to organize their experiences differently from English speakers. Whorf argued that all humans think within language and that our particular language affects the possibilities and limitations of our thought. In other words, our language sets up categories into which we fit what we encounter.
Whorf did not persuade all linguists to his way of thinking, but he persuaded me.
I considered his theory applicable not only to humans but also to non-human users of language, such as Koko the gorilla, who communicated to humans through American Sign Language. So when Cosmo learned to talk, I assumed that her acquaintance with English, however simplified, was influencing her to view the world differently from the way she would have viewed it had she not acquired speech. English gave her conceptual categories, as it does to all language speakers. However, most of us English-speaking humans have more conceptual categories than Cosmo does.
Do other animals — those trillions who don’t speak to us humans — have conceptual categories to make sense of their experiences? Categories such as predator, prey, danger, food, water, mate, babies, family and perhaps friend?
There’s no way of finding out, unfortunately, because as soon as we give an animal the language that would let him tell us, we’ve given him our categories.
After realizing that Cosmo must categorize all foods as “peanut,” “grape” or “corn,” and all animals as “dog,” bird” or “squirrel,” I see that my access to her thoughts is as limited as the grammar and vocabulary I gave her. She knows in her bird brain that pork and pineapple are different from each other, but to request a bite she must use the vocabulary she has.
At the veterinary clinic, did Cosmo not recognize any significant difference between Creamsicle and the dogs she’s met? I can’t answer that, and Cosmo can’t tell me.
But Cosmo has taught me something very important: that communication of thoughts and feelings in language is not a measure of those thoughts and feelings — in anybody, whether feathery, furry or hairy.
Cosmo has also taught me that communication with individuals of any species, however it happens, can bring great joy.
When Cosmo spoke “doggy” to Creamsicle, barking “woo woo woo,” she was trying to communicate with her. Cosmo wanted to make friends.
• Betty Jean Craige is professor emerita of comparative literature at the University of Georgia and the author of many books, including “Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot” (2010). Her email is bettyjean@cosmotalks.com. Cosmo’s website is www.cosmotalks.com.
