by Pajarita » Sun Jul 27, 2014 11:24 am
Yep, all of those. Actually, they would have been better off been mute, unintelligent and ugly because people would have left them alone instead of wanting them as pets.
Parrots (all birds, actually) are extraordinarily complex and fascinating animals. They are beautiful, loving, intelligent, compassionate, empathetic and forgiving and it is for all these reasons that people want them as pets but it's unfortunate for them because the best any of us can do is give them half a life. And they don't deserve that.
Most people want a parrot for what the parrot does for them, whether this is entertainment, beauty, fill up a need for love, social status, etc it's irrelevant because the result is the same. They like the exotic aspect ("I have a parrot!") and colorful beauty of them (picture after picture and Youtube video after video) as well as the love and companionship they provide because they don't find it with other humans (which is too heavy an onus to put on a little bird) but the problem with this is that the animal is not loved for itself, it's loved for what it gives its human and that's not really love, it's self-interest. Intelligence and the ability to talk makes things worse because it creates expectations that not all parrots can fulfill. I personally thoroughly dislike Dr. Pepperberg not only for the inhumane way her parrots were/are kept but also because since people found out how intelligent Alex was, everybody wants one just like him. But Alex plucked, he suffered from chronic aspergillosis and died young from the stress of living in a lab without a human or bird companion of its own.
Bird lovers did not need Dr. Pepperberg to tell them that parrots are smart, we already knew it. We knew they could talk in context, too (I had a quaker about 47 years ago that used cognitive speech and it didn't catch anybody in my family by surprise either!). We might not have known they are so smart that they can understand the concept of zero but, to be honest, my reaction to this is "Who cares?!" I don't need an animal to understand a difficult concept for me to love it or even appreciate it.
So, yes, like Wolf said, I meant all those things you mentioned.
PS As an interesting note, the Carolina parakeet became extinct in a few years not only because of their feathers, it was mainly because colonial farmers considered them an agricultural pest and killed them very easily (they would shoot them when the flock was flying over them, the dead and wounded fell to the ground and the entire flock would make a U turn and come down to the ground to stay with the wounded so the farmers shot them pretty much like sitting ducks!)