Category Archives: Parrots

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. 

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.)

Dayko Dog Didn’t Need To Die (Sean Hannity 100% Correct On Pet Food)

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Hebrew Testament, Morality, Parrots

Handlers clearly neglected a wonderful working dog, Dayko, who died of exhaustion (“massive coronary myocardial infarction and acute respiratory failure”), rooting for survivors of the Ecuador earthquake. Now the Ibara fire service is glorifying Dayko somewhat self-servingly, in my opinion, when a couple of big bowls of water infused with electrolytes would have kept Dayko alive.

I never understand it when people are unresponsive to my many educational posts about parrots. “I’m a dog person,” they shrug. Despite being a parrot person—indeed, nothing compares to a parrot for sheer intelligent, sociability, use of language (a thing no other animal musters) and cuteness—the plight of all abused and neglected animals pains.

37ILANA Mercer, Puckering With Precious Poi

Guiltily, Sean Hannity commented today on the radio about dog food. He thinks he’s wrong to feed his dogs chunks of what he himself eats. Mr. Hannity has clearly been told by pushers of fake food that dogs need extruded pellets.

WTF? And why? That people can be led to think extruded foodstuff, out of packets, is better for an animal than fresh food—a little meat, fish, chicken (BONES!), fruit, vegetables, nuts (for birdies)—is idiotic. (Birds do not thrive on seed or lettuce. They will become malnourished and exhibit deformities.)

Where in nature do animals eat processed food? I’m sure you can save money by going back to the old-fashioned practice of feeding your pets scraps or, still better, apportioning them a little of your food, before eating. As Mr. Hannity does.

The Hebrew Bible tells us to feed our (servants) and animals first.

In any event, this sweet soul didn’t need to die. Rest in peace, Dayko.

P.S.: Oscar-Wood, the parrot of the house is currently evicting all the “bad toys” from his toy box. (Parrots always have a plan; always up to something.) He keeps only the toys he likes. The room is strewn with “bad toys,” tossed high and low emphatically and as he gives me dirty looks: “don’t you know I don’t tolerate these toys?” He roots around, actively separating out the toys, until in the toy box remain only the favored wooden toys. Adorable hook-bill.