Renaming parrots: Do we have the right?

[GreenWing]

There is no such thing as a 'stupid' bird (or any other animal for that matter, only people who think they are stupid are stupid or ignorant).

tisk tisk, Pajarita, you oughtn't deliver such broad sweeping generalizations. It isn't good for the peace of the forum. I, by your definition am stupid. No one can ever convince me that cattle are smart after all of my experience.

Sorry, but I'm with Pajarita on this, and she has the right to be frank about such comments. Assuming "certain" parrots -- and birds in general -- are "stupid" IS indeed ignorant. E.g., there are MANY videos on youtube of crows using tools to get a piece of food.

Check it:



And did you know that you can CLICKER TRAIN chickens!? It's true. I know of people involved in bird rescues that can attest to this.

Remember, birds are dinosaurs, dinosaurs that survived a major mass extinction. Let's show them more respect and not refer to them as stupid or ignorant.

Also, humans are animals. We are certainly not the only intelligent animal on this planet. This type of thinking is dangerous to the planet and to the other animals that share this Earth.

[Scotty]

Ahh sorry for my poor choice of wording, I really have a bad habit of typing and not thinking sometimes...

I meant a bird not as smart as other birds or species is what I should of said before.

How does this sound? Every animal that has a brain has intelligence, but not all animals are equally intelligent... I think this is more of what I meant to say before too...

We also all need to look up the actual defintion of the word stupid and not just generalize it either, because yes there are certainly stupid birds, in the sense of the defintion, by having some stupid qualities, but not necessarily all the attributes of stupidity.

[Pajarita]

I stand by my words, I don't think there is a 'stupid' animal. I think that we tend to measure animals' intelligence by our own measuring stick and that is not fair to them. They might not be able to learn as much as we do but they know what they need to know and a bit extra and all of them are able to learn. Are there levels of intelligence within the same species? Of course! I've had dogs that were geniuses and I've had some that were a bit slow but that doesn't mean they were stupid. Cattle is another story because when you talk about them, say, sheep, for example, you are not talking about a species created by nature, you are talking about a man-made animal (domesticated over 10,000 years ago) and we outbred most of their smarts because it was convenient to us - they were bred out of the mouflon which is extremely skittish and wary of humans so along with increasing wool production and fertility, the 'smarts' were bred out of them to enable us to keep herds.

I am sorry if I offended the humans with my comments. One of my biggest faults is that I am very vocal about my liking animals much better than people. Animals I understand: you treat them right, they will treat you the same way - you love them, they love you back. Simple. Even when they do bad things, there is always a reason why, while people simply do bad things because they can, a concept I can't understand. And some of them actually enjoy doing these bad things... But animals are never evil, they always try their very best and would always return good with good. Even poor and not so intelligent sheep.

[Scotty]

Pajarita, I think I understand where you are coming from. All I was trying to point out is that there are many aspects to what the defintion of stupid implies and if you fall into one of those, then it's considered stupid.

I also didn't explain myself, that as an example, making a bad mistake or decision is considered on some levels stupid...

Like the bird runs across the road as example and gets hit, so what do we call this? Well it wasn't really smart., but of course we're talking about a small animal with limited intelligence and pretty smart for what he/she is, but getting hit, well do we call this stupid? I think we can say it is to a point, but I also don't mean it as a stupid bonehead, idiot like statement either, if you get what I mean.

People twist words around and put them in a sort of slang context, this isn't what I meant, like they are bonehead moron stupid idiots...

I got the feeling maybe you were looking at it from a slang word standpoint, I'm not sure...

Hopefully I made my point clearer...

So of course animals do stupid things because of their limited intelligence, not stupid as in idiots or boneheads, again as a Slang look, take on the word...

[KimberlyAnn]

I don't think we have the right to rename animals who know their names. My grandmother acquired a cat named Trouble. She hated the name so she decided to call him Mr. Cat. Dumb.

So every time I would come to see my gram, I would secretly call "Mr. Cat" Trouble. And Trouble always whipped his head around when I said his name and came to me as if to say, "Finally! Someone who knows ME!"

[Pajarita]

LOL - Of course he knew his name! My cats come when I call them by their names and they even know the others' names, too!