Category Archives: Environmentalism & Animal Rights

UPDATED (1/14/020): Traumatized Parrots & Veterans Flock Together To Heal

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intelligence, Parrots

The veteran and parrot community exhibit remarkably similar symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, which is why they are uniquely able to help each heal. This achingly beautiful expose looks at post traumatic stress disorder in parrots and how, in their great intelligence and capacity to detect emotions, these much-abused creatures are drawn to veterans and can help them heal. Explains Matt Simmons, once a highly accomplished military and business man, who got “broken” in combat and found his way back through parrots:

… Now, when I’m with a parrot, it’s not a total time-change thing, but I do have to act like a 12-year-old boy again. And here’s why. Because parrots are not domesticated animals. They haven’t been bred for hundreds of years to be at my feet.’’ Simmons paused for a sip of Coke, the third one of the night. ‘‘So in order to have a relationship with a parrot, that parrot has to select me. In order for that to happen, that parrot has to be comfortable. I have to come in open and quiet and calm. Much like that 12-year-old boy that met the mean dog next door and never had a problem. Much like that 12-year-old boy that went hiking and saw a mountain lion. I’m acting like the 12-year-old boy again around the parrots, and what that does is help me confront my trauma rather than carry it around. Because now I’m with a psychiatrist, and I’m talking about how this bird didn’t feel so good today and wasn’t very comfortable and was kind of hiding in the back of the cage, and the psychiatrist goes, ‘Hmm, you’re starting to talk about emotions.’ I’m talking about how the bird was feeling, but I’m also transferring my own emotions. So being with the parrots allows me to take that third-person look at my own trauma, which you can never do when you’re whacked out on Vicodin and Budweiser and living under a cement highway bridge.

… In one recent psychiatric study conducted at Midwest Avian Adoption and Rescue Services, a parrot sanctuary and rehabilitation facility in Minnesota, a captive-bred male umbrella cockatoo who had been exposed to multiple caregivers who were themselves highly unstable (e.g. domestic violence, substance abuse, addiction) was given a diagnosis of complex PTSD. When examined through the lens of complex PTSD, Dr. Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist and ecologist and an author of the study, wrote, the symptoms of many caged parrots are almost indistinguishable from those of human P.O.W.s and concentration-camp survivors. She added that severely traumatized cockatoos commonly exhibit rapid pacing in cage, distress calls, screams, self-mutilation, aggression in response to .?.?. physical contact, nightmares insomnia.

… Veterans, of course, share similar psychological scarring, but whenever I asked any of them how it is that the parrots succeed in connecting where human therapists and fellow group-therapy members can’t, the answer seemed to lie precisely in the fact that parrots are alien intelligences: parallel, analogously wounded minds that know and feel pain deeply and yet at a level liberatingly beyond the prescriptive confines of human language and prejudices. …

… Abandoned pet parrots are twice-traumatized beings: denied first their natural will to flock and then the company of the humans who owned them. In the wild, parrots ply the air, mostly, in the same way whales do the sea: together and intricately. Longtime pairs fly wing to wing within extended, close-knit social groupings in which individual members, scientists have recently discovered, each have unique identifiable calls, like human names. Parrots learn to speak them soon after birth, during a transitional period of vocalizing equivalent to human baby babbling known as subsong, in order to better communicate with members of their own flocks and with other flocks. This, it turns out, is the root of that vaunted gift for mimicry, which, along with their striking plumages and beguilingly fixed, wide-eyed stares, has long induced us to keep parrots — neuronally hard-wired flock animals with up to 60-to-70-year life spans and the cognitive capacities of 4-to-5-year-old children — all to ourselves in a parlor cage: a broken flight of human fancy; a keening kidnapee. …

…. recent studies of crows and parrots have revealed that birds think and learn using an entirely different part of their brains, a kind of avian neocortex known as the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale. In both parrots and crows, in fact, the ratio of brain to body size is similar to that of the higher primates, an encephalization quotient that yields in both species not only the usual indications of cognitive sophistication like problem-solving and tool use but also two aspects of intelligence long thought to be exclusively human: episodic memory and theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states, like intention, desire and awareness, to yourself and to others. …

UPDATE (1/14/020):  Parrots are innately kind. 

TRUMP @ 1238 Says ‘Market Forces Are Beautiful’ & Other Lovely Things

Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Economy, Elections, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Regulation, Republicans

Twenty eight minutes and 27 seconds into this YouTube of his press conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, Donald Trump emerged to take questions: He has reached and surpassed the 1237 delegate threshold. Behind him stand “the folks, delegates, who got him over the top.”

Trump sounded masterful—and mirthful. If only he put on this hat all the time:

* About Obama badmouthing Trump at the G-7 summit: “It’s good, although Obama used a business term, rattled, and he known nothing about business. It’s good that world leaders are “rattled” by him, Trump. As for Obama’s assessment of his, Trump’s, ignorance, basically who’s he to talk? “Obama has done a horrible job. He’s got to say something. Every time he has a news conference he talks about Trump. Obama has not done a good job; we’re divided, we have tremendous difficulties.”
* VP: We are not going to pander and get a woman or minority just for show. We’ll have women involved, as we do now, but “we’re looking for absolute competence.”
* Hillary: No I don’t want her out of the race.


I want to have her in the race. The report is devastating. She’s skirting on the edge. This is her history of bad judgement. I love watching Hillary fight. She can’t close the deal.
* Message to Suzanna Martinez. Nothing much.
* The HuffingtonPost; I don’t read it. Do they cover politics?
* Muslim ban: We’ll look at the solutions. (As of this moment, the ban, it would seem, stands.)
* I’d love to debate Bernie Sanders … for charity. The problem with debating Sanders is that he is going to lose the nomination, as the system is rigged.
* Debating process: We’re not debaters, we businessmen; we put people to work. We businessmen don’t talk, we do.
* Regulating energy: The Federal government should get out of the way. They’ve put the coalmines out of business—which is what Hillary has promised. Energy independence and exporting energy is what Trump promises. Coal can be restored, if regulations are reduced. All I can, says Trump, is free-up coal and let the market work. Market forces are a beautiful thing.
* Give the people of the US a piece of the profits from the Keystone Pipeline and other such projects.
* Lower taxes are key to economic vitality. America is over-regulated. Regulation is even more of a problem than taxes, which will go down.
* About Elizabeth Warren aka …


* On first-day duties: Trump will be “unwinding various executive orders,” not least the ones affecting the porous border on the country’s Southwest.
* Intends to make use of the Republican campaign-infrastructure machine.
* “I won’t forget Indiana.”
* Fracking and our feathered friends: Bernie will ban it; Hillary will ban it. We’re going to open it up. Solar is expensive. It has a 30-year payback. And it’s killing all the eagles in California, one of the most beautiful and treasured of our birds.
* Blessed be the Farmers.
* Accursed is the New York Times, which doesn’t need Donald’s help in discrediting itself.

So what if Trump forgot to bless the cheese-makers:

Deformed Dwarfs Ride Horses To Their Deaths At Freakness

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Morality

Try running fast yourselves, freaks. Don’t ride an animal to death. As detailed in the post “American Pharoah Flogged To Victory,” the demonic, deformed dwarfs riding these beautiful and brave racehorses are merciless motherf-ckers. It’s as simple as all that. Two noble creatures were ridden to death by more such little devils, jockeys they’re called, at the Preakness (not sure if that’s a typo) this year.

The Left’s Creed: Live In A Herd Or Die, Baby Bison (Or Anyone Else)

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Parrots

The Left’s creed carries over into its “management” of wildlife: Live in a herd or we’ll kill you.

The details are sketchy because written by left-liberal, state-adulating outlets, like The Washington Post. The same short-on-details storyline is echoed by ALL other news outlets and by the droning clones on social media.

Translated: The official say-so is the only say-so.

A baby bison is found at Yellowstone National Park by two good samaritans. The official account fails to provide inconvenient details because it has a distinct angle. However, logic tells me tourists would not remove a baby bison from its mom and herd. This likely was a solitary newborn. And, indeed, buried at the end of the malicious depiction of the do-goobers is this:

… the tourists found the bison in the middle of a road and tried, unsuccessfully, to make it move.
“Out of desperation,” said a Yellowstone spokeswoman, they took it to rangers. “They were just concerned about the well-being of the animal.”

Before that clarification, the “reporter” at WaPo had asserted the tourists simply “saw a baby bison, … decided it looked cold and needed to be rescued. So they loaded it in the trunk of their car and drove it to a ranger station.”

(Media deserve to die-out if they hire reporters who can’t write sans a personal angle. As an editor, I’m running a red marker through phrases such as “decided it looked cold,” to be replaced with neutral descriptions: “The tourists report/claim the baby was … in the middle of the road, unable to … “)

These “stupid tourists,” whom none of the still stupider journalists and followers of officialdom seemed to have interviewed, are alleged to have absconded with the baby bison because he looked cold.

Naturally, the fanatic rangers who’ll not tolerate deviation from nature euthanized the baby.

“We don’t manage for individuals; we manage for ecosystems.”

Resorting to symbolism, namely “attributing symbolic meanings or significance to objects, events, or relationships,” is not a practice I like. So do forgive me, but I can’t help seeing some symbolism here; some glaring parallels to how the Left treats humankind:

Conform or we’ll make you wish you were dead.

(Not to stray even further, but the convergence of Left and Right is almost complete on most issues, likely on this one too.)