Chimpanzees and dolphins, long considered perhaps the smartest non-human animals on earth, soon may have to share that honor with an animal most people considered nothing more than birdbrained.
That would be the parrot. A growing body of evidence seems to show that parrots, like chimps and dolphins, can master complex intellectual concepts that most human children are not capable of mastering until the age of 5.
If so, parrots easily are the smartest of all animals commonly adopted by humans as household pets. In fact, the popularity of parrots, whose intriguing ability to mimic spoken language has always fascinated humans, has grown faster in the last 10 years than any other animal.
Pet experts gathering in Chicago on Friday for the American Veterinary Medical Association’s annual animal welfare forum believe that popularity is based on their evident intelligence, their striking physical beauty and their natural sociability that can make them extraordinary companions for human owners who know how to handle them. Because so many parrot breeds are long-lived, up to 70 or 80 years, they stick around longer than nearly any other pet, too, sometimes becoming the oldest member of the household, humans included.
That is a long time for anybody to commit to an animal. In addition to being smart, parrots seem to be persnickety animals, too, making getting along with them problematic at times.
Emotionally volatile on the order of a human toddler in the “terrible 2’s,” when upset they can be a handful, especially considering they have, as one enthusiast puts it, “can openers on the front of their faces.”
Unfortunately, the experts say, too many owners don’t understand the complex needs and nature of their parrots, and end up ruining the lives of their birds.
This year’s forum, at Rosemont’s Clarion International Hotel, is devoted to caring for pet birds, with a heavy emphasis on improving understanding and husbandry of parrots based on recent research findings.
Birds rank as the third most popular household pet, after dogs and cats. Differing pet authorities place their numbers anywhere from 12 million to 40 million birds in 5 million American homes.
At least three-quarters of all pet birds come from the 350 species loosely known as parrots–from wee, 7-inch budgies to the 3-foot macaws.
For the last couple of decades, they have been coming under the increasing interest of scientists who suspected parrots’ mimicry abilities might be a manifestation of intelligence nobody had investigated before.
The most ground-breaking work has been done with Alex, a 13-month old African Grey parrot purchased in 1977 at a Chicago pet shop. The purchaser was ecologist and evolutionary biologist Irene Pepperberg.
Then just starting her parrot research at Purdue University, Pepperberg, now at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has amassed an impressive and widely discussed body of research on Alex and other birds.
Pepperberg’s experiments with Alex proved among many things that a bird could link a word with a physical object, naming such things as keys when asked. He can identify objects by size, shape, color and materials they are made from.
“All of the tests done with dolphins and great apes to investigate their intelligence we’ve done with Alex,” Pepperberg said in a phone interview early this week. “He has scored as well as they did in many of them, better in some. He can identify 50 objects, seven colors, knows quantities up to eight, concepts of categories and things being the same and different.”
While there is some disagreement in scientific circles as to how Pepperberg interprets the results of her work with Alex and other birds, the validity of her experiments and the data it has produced is widely admired. Because bird brains are so different from brains of advanced mammals, it has caught the interest of neuroscience, psychology and researchers looking for new clues into such human frailties as learning disabilities and autism.
“I compare parrot brains with chimp brains like people compared the old Macintosh computers with IBM computers. They are wired in different ways, and they use different software to do the same things, but, when the same data goes in, the same answers come out of both systems.”
“The very things that make parrots so appealing to people is what gets so many pet birds into trouble,” said Liz Wilson, a Philadelphia parrot behavior consultant.
She trains parrot owners on how to care for their birds and retrains birds that have developed negative behaviors because of human neglect. In her presentation at the meeting she said she will urge veterinarians to steer unsuitable human owners away from buying parrots.
“Parrots are in vogue right now as pets, and nothing can be worse for animals than to be in vogue,” Wilson said.
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“You wouldn’t go off to work in the morning and leave a 2-year-old child alone at home to roam around the house, especially one with a can opener attached to the front of its face.”
Set loose unattended with their intense curiosity, powerful beaks and remarkably agile feet, they can and do tear furniture apart.
While they may be bright, beautiful and affectionate, parrots also are emotionally volatile, extremely messy, self-centered, domineering, jealous and so loud when they want to be.
Wilson said most people who buy baby parrots get rid of them after five years. That can be a problem for an animal whose emotional well-being depends on stable, unchanging, long-term relationships and surroundings.
“These are not low-maintenance animals,” she said. “A parrot has its own opinion about everything, and if you don’t teach it to behave, it won’t.”
The most enthusiastic parrot owners love their birds for their affectionate behavior, said David Graham, professor of avian health at Texas A & M University’s veterinary school.
“They pair, bond and vocalize all day long with their mates and others in their flocks in the wild,” he said, “and that sociability is transferred to people in captivity.”
Parrots, however, are very conscious of pecking order and refuse to be subservient to humans, said Chris Davis, a California parrot psychology expert.
The old cliche of the scarred old pirate with a pet parrot on his shoulder has become something of an insider joke with parrot experts, she said.
Parrots in fact often try to express their dominance by demanding to roost on their human companion’s shoulder and have been known to give the human a nasty bite on the face if he objects to the bird being there.
“You have to wonder sometimes who’s in charge. It depends on the personality of the individual bird,” Davis said. “If he is a Jimmy Stewart kind of guy, he’ll be sweet and compliant.
“If he’s an Adolf Hitler, watch out. I have seen entire families, their German shepherds included, buffaloed by a bird. They are never subservient.”
Parrot lore, however, is just as full of stories of sweet behavior on the part of the birds.
“People will come home blue and even in tears at the end of a day,” said Liz Wilson, “and they tell me their bird outright asked them, `Is something wrong?’
“I have shared more than half my life with one parrot. After 26 years, she is my closest friend. I adore living with a creature like that. They don’t give you unconditional love, like a dog does. If you are a jerk, a parrot will stop loving you. You have to earn their love. I like that.”