by Pajarita » Tue Sep 05, 2017 10:44 am
OK, several questions - let's see... Yes, I met her and she was arrogant, mercenary and -well, some people would be nice and call her 'impolite' but I don't like her so I will use the same word I always use to describe: plain nasty. Years ago, I was a member [and one of the two VPs] of a Manhattan bird club and we had contacted her to give a chat about her study and book for our members. The venue was one of NYC public libraries because they allow the use of their facilities for seminars, meetings, workshops, etc. free of charge to non-profit organizations but, because this is for non-profits and free of charge, you can't have any form of commerce in them. We sent her the paperwork indicating this among other things and she signed it BUT when she showed up [late and did not apologize or even acknowledge the fact], she had this entourage that brought tables and displays to sell her books. We tried to tell her that this was forbidden to us AND her as our guest but she did not even stop to talk or explain, just kept on walking toward the dais. We also tried telling her employees that they were not allowed to sell her books inside the library but they only answered to her. In consequence, we received a letter revoking our privilege so we could never use any public library for anything for the club. We wrote to her asking her to clarify to them that we had sent her the terms and that she had agreed to them so we could appeal this but she never even answered.
Alex's 'official' cause of death was a fatal cardio-vascular episode. They said that it could have been a stroke, could have been a heart attack, could have been caused by atherosclerosis, could have been arrhythmia, could have been genetic - lots of 'could have been' which did not make much sense because a massive heart attack is easily discernible from the heart tissue in a necropsy or an autopsy and, if he had suffered from arrhythmia or atherosclerosis, they would have known from before. I am not arguing that he died of a cardio-vascular something, what I argue is that they never even mentioned stress as a possible cause when, most likely, it was! Years after this, there was a study done with African grays that showed that birds that are under the chronic stress of living alone have shorter telomeres than birds that live with other birds.
Do we know if he was stressed out and depressed? Well, we know the super unnatural conditions he lived under [in a lab, working all day long, with nobody of his own, human or bird and, most likely, a bad light schedule and diet] and we know that he plucked and suffered from chronic aspergillosis - two things that don't happen to well-adjusted birds that live stress-free all their lives. I always remember something I read in a book called 'Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species' about him. The author had asked to interview Dr. P and Alex for the book and, when she got there, Alex was not cooperating so he 'negotiated' terms: one hour of shoulder time and sitting on a window sill so he could look outside to a tree. I cannot even begin to tell how much this impacted me... it truly broke my heart! Poor, poor Alex! Living in a steel and glass environment, all alone, working every single day and having to do it for things that should have been his by right! A bit of companionship and being able to look out to something natural...
Why did they have to change Dr. P's assistants all the time? Because, if they hadn't, they would have been accused of the person conducting the experiment somehow indicating to the parrot how to respond and the study would not have survived scrutiny or peer review. Dr. P was absent more than she was present at the lab, it was her assistants that worked with Alex. She spent almost all her time working toward getting grants and funding for it - she would travel for two and three weeks at a time. But, aside from the fact that the only person who was a constant in his life was not really there for him all the time, disappearing constantly for weeks at a time, she did not regard him as a companion or even a pet. She actually said in an interview that he was nothing more than the subject of her study so, in reality, poor Alex did not have anybody who actually loved him. Dr. P wrote another book after he died claiming that she loved him and missed him but, if you ask me, she was just catering to the huge outpouring of public grief over his death and trying to make money out of it.