UPDATE II: ‘Dead Birds Flying’: Help Steve Boyes Help The Cape Parrot

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intelligence, Pseudoscience, South-Africa, The Zeitgeist

Birds in flight are the very symbol of liberty. Yet what do people do to the most sentient, socially and intellectually evolved among them? We cage them and maim them by clipping their wing feathers.

And what a heart has Dr. Steve Boyes!

He has dedicated himself to reversing the destruction humans have wrought on the Cape Parrot. What a heroic commitment he and his team (including Cape communicator Rodnick Biljon, who captures the Cape Parrot on film) have pledged to rescuing the Cape Parrot from extinction, brought about by the decimation of the Yellowood forests of the Eastern Cape. (Your host hails from Cape Town.)

The Cape Parrot Project is one of my favored charities. Owned as I am by an Un-Cape Parrot (a genetic relative to the wild Cape Parrot), I’ve had the privilege of experiencing first-hand the intense brilliance of these precious Pois (mine is Poicephalus fuscicollis; the Cape Parrot is Poicephalus robustus). We rescued Oscar-Wood from a cage in a store, where he had languished for 4 years, plucking his feathers down to the pink skin beneath. This, after having been sold into the trade by a well-known breeder in Hawaii.

LOOK at him then (2009):

Another heartbreaking image (2009):

Here Oscar-Wood is today (2012), fully flighted, nesting in a bag of tortillas. This state of relative well-being has come about only because I work from home and am able to give him the attention and freedom he requires to thrive. And still he plucks; once acquired, this neurotic habit is hard to eliminate.

Oscar-Wood has a facility with … wood (all parrots require wood, preferably from a tree, in the wild):

WARNING. Do not try the above at home. By all means, rescue an abandoned and abused parrot, but do not fuel the wicked pet parrot trade, which everywhere and always involves breeding mills, inhumane by definition. As to wild-life traffickingg … words fail.

Those who’ve bothered to get to know a parrot in flight, if hobbled horribly by the walls of a house (the Cape, for example, can fly hundreds of kilometers in a day), know this: Out of a cage, free to be adorable and impossible as only hookbills are—parrots are so much smarter than any of the domesticated animals (and than some of your neighbors).

Even showmen such as parrot whisperer Clint Carvalho attests that the larger parrots are “twenty times smarter than dogs.” I’m not sure how Carvalho quantifies his findings, but these sound about right.

Know a politician with this magic macaw’s problem-solving skills? Tan’s Japanese admirers are enthralled. As well they should be. Watch Tan solve an impossible magic-cube like puzzle:

What’s positive about Carvalho is that, unlike your average avian dabbler, he has realized that parrots acquire rudimentary language (often greater than those acquired by the bumper crops of illiterates US public schools produce) through conditioning and cognition, just as kids do.

The cognitive capacities of the parrot, however, match his emotional needs.

Unlike dogs and cats, birds are wild animals, ill-suited to captivity. Moreover, they’re flock animals who wither without the physical proximity of a feathered family with which they fly, forage, communicate and mate, often for life.

The trade is fueled by consumer demand.

Being slaves to authority and convention, the mass of humanity doesn’t much like or appreciate the independent-minded individuals among them. Imagine the fate of a creature as smart, as independent-minded and as individualistic as the parrot?

Consider the cruelty of excluding parrots from assorted public-awareness campaigns. Funds are invariably solicited for and awareness raised over the airwaves about abused and needy dogs and cats. Not so for parrots. Despite their popularity as pets and their prevalence in American homes, natural disasters come and go without any mention of the plight of the Psittacine victims.

Coveted. “Consumed.” Discarded.

That is the fate of parrots bred for the pet trade. Break the cycle. Adopt a neglected and abused animal from a shelter. Support your community based shelters.

AND donate to save the Cape Parrot.

Writes Dr. Boyes:

Most people know about the popular African Grey parrots of central and western Africa, but very few people know about Africa’s most endangered parrot, South Africa’s Cape parrot. Today, there could be as few as 800 Cape parrots remaining in the wild and they are considered Critically Endangered due to continued habitat loss, poor nesting success due to lack of nest cavities, a severe Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease epidemic, historical persecution as a crop pest, and illegal capture for the wild-caught bird trade. If Africa was to lose this “green and gold” ambassador of some of our last-remaining Afromontane forest patches, it would be a sign of very bad times to come… We would have lost one of the last Afromontane endemics clinging onto these forests through their own ingenuity and collective intelligence. Intensive logging in their forest habitat, persecution (e.g. being shot or caught in nets and clubbed to death), nest poaching and mist-netting adults for the wild-caught bird trade, and very little or no conservation intervention, has left the Cape Parrot in ruins with an aging populations in declining physical condition. We need to intervene now and stimulate positive change for Cape parrots in the wild

UPDATE (3/25): Following the Facebook thread.

JP: Point taken, but parrot are picky about friends and partners. The chances of a friendship being struck up are greater when the other parrot is of the same species. Personally, I recommend against taking on two parrots. That’s much like planning for one toddler and learning that you’ll be giving birth to twins. It’s never easier. Better that you be a good parront to one parrot than shortchange both and yourself. Of course, if you do not work, or your work is not too demanding (because parrots are), have a large enough house and homestead (maybe even place for an outdoor aviary)—by all means. Caring for parrots under the right conditions is rewarding. There is nothing like the love of a parrot, once earned.

Baby is currently doing lapse from his cage to kitchen cupboard (or what’s left of it; our kitchen has not been renovated and we’re delaying that job until we can think of how to parrot proof Sean’s planned maple-wood cabinetry).

Oscar-Wood is also talking up a storm. Singing his musical repertoire; knocking, and then demanding, “Hello, hello”; asking if I’m going, “Bye-bye-bye?” and if he’s been a “bad bird?” He’s also doing his raspy chest cough, because he knows the sound worries me. Should I dare to attempt to bathe him (parrots bath themselves pretty thoroughly), it’s an indignant, “Hey, hey!” Tell me that’s not a very decent attempt to communicate.

Beauty And The Beast In The Middle East

Israel, Political Correctness

Political correctness does not seem to be a state religion in Israel.

Israel has just crowned its first black beauty queen, an Ethiopian immigrant. She was invited to meet with Presidents Simon Peres and Barack Obama (Bibi Netanyahu is prime minister).

Here a YNet correspondent asks her (in Hebrew) whether she thinks she would have been invited to meet with Peres and Obama were she not black. Perfectly calmly the beauty queen replies in the negative. In the US, the latter (beauty) would have burst out crying, the former (correspondent) would have been sacked for insensitivity.

Exorcize The Neocon Within! (You Know You Are A Neocon If…)

Feminism, Foreign Policy, Gender, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Race, Reason, Republicans

Wear your amulets to ward off the neocons; they have us surrounded. Old Right, peace-loving classical liberals—to the extent we still exist—are never safe from accusations of appeasement (not wanting to kill innocents abroad), racism (believing in the right of the individual to associate and dissociate at will—once known as the right of private property), and lack of patriotism (wishing to see Rome’s military and marching camps downsized considerably).

Jack Kerwick provides a wonderfully exhaustive list in case you are in need of exorcism. I particularly appreciate the following more subtle points:

You talk tirelessly of individual responsibility even as you affirm political determinism when it comes to black Americans and Middle Eastern Muslims. All of the ills that plague black Americans you chalk up to the poisonous policies of the Democratic Party while all of the problems of which the Muslim world is ridden you attribute to its lack of “democracy.”
Even though Hispanics voted for Barack Obama by over 70 percent in November, and blacks voted for him by over 90 percent, you insist that the only reason for this is that Republicans have failed to “reach out” to these groups. If only their members knew what the Republican Party could do for them (more political determinism), you imply, they would flock to the GOP, for blacks, and particularly Hispanics, are “natural conservatives.”
You make claims regarding the “natural conservatism” of Hispanics and Hispanic immigrants that you would never think to make about Muslims—even though, by many measures, Muslims are far more “conservative” than Hispanics and white Americans alike.

I would add that neocons, led by their fairly stupid eye candy on the idiot’s lantern—S. E. Cupp (“Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine”) and Dana Perino (“the Heidi Klum of the commentariat”) come to mind, or just mediocre minds like that of Andrea Tarantula—all argue from feminism. Their gender based commentary is that of the left, with a difference: They claim that the GOP is the natural home of women—just as it is the party of black and Hispanic homies.

Glass ceilings, 70 cents to a man’s dollar: These are the stock “arguments” made by skimpily clad (usually single and childless) Republican/neoliberal women on TV.

The Republican Party’s operatives seldom challenge the pay inequality folderol. The Daily Caller’s take on gender reflects the mindset of your typical Republican toots; it enforces the Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber perspectives we’ve come to expect from the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively. The correspondent protested Nancy Pelosi’s pay equity protest, staged in Washington, D.C. the other day.
In the typical tit-for-tat, rudderless case the Republicans excel at making, this reporter condemned Pelosi—but not for her bogus theory of pay inequality, but for her hypocrisy. To wit: “…a report in the Washington Free Beacon … revealed that women working for Senate Democrats in 2011 had an average salary of $60,877, whereas male staffers made about $6,500 more. Pelosi chose not to condemn the Democratic senators,’ complained the Daily Caller’s cub (female) reporter.
Implicit in this accusation is that the wage discrepancy reported spoke to the widely accepted conspiracy to suppress women’s wages. Had this reporter been capable of argument, this is what she’d say: “We commend you, Mrs. Pelosi, for not practicing the nonsense you preach and, paying your staffers in accordance with their productivity” (a term you can’t honestly apply to the wealth-consuming government worker, but which we will, for the sake of argument). …

Yes, Republican twits and turncoats have even joined the war on older, white men.

The Other Brother Bedevils Obama

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Christianity, Conservatism, Media, Race

“The Other Brother Bedevils Obama” is the current column. Read it on WND. Here’s an excerpt:

“‘The Bible,’ a popular new History Channel miniseries, is not my cup of tea—and not because of a lack of religiosity of which I am guilty.

This production may well work as a proselytizing device for the average reality TV consumer. Pop-productions, courtesy of the star of ‘Touched by an Angel,’ however, are less effective with those who’ve studied the Hebrew Bible—perhaps the greatest literary work ever—in the language in which it was written.

Interesting, though, are the recognizable facial features of the actor who plays the antagonist in the series.

James Poniewozik of Time magazine has pointed out, sarcastically, that ‘a raft of viewers–including noted Biblical scholar Glenn Beck–claimed that the show’s version of Satan bore a striking resemblance to’ Barack Obama.

Their dark foreboding excepted, the facial features of the actor who plays Satan in ‘The Bible’ do resemble Obama’s.

Moroccan actor Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni is well cast in the role of ‘The Bible’s’ Prince of Darkness. As expected, Mehdi Ouazanni as Satan looks sinister. However, while the contours of Ouzaani’s face bear a striking likeness to Obama’s, the president usually takes care to face Americans—a people who take everything at face value—sunny side up only.

He may be a man of many masks, but President Obama’s face is generally bereft of the pall of evil that blankets Beelzebub’s face in ‘The Bible.’

There was an exception big media failed to notice, because of the providential prism through which they view (and filter) Barack Obama.

Quite recently, Obama let the very darkness that blackens Ouzaani’s face in ‘The Bible’ deform his own features. This happened during the National Prayer Breakfast, in the course of Dr. Ben Carson’s keynote address.

The Breakfast took place before the Republicans commenced a ‘slobbering love affair’ with Dr. Carson, an accomplished and affable African-American, who serves as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. …

… Was anyone watching the president’s face during The Other Brother’s Prayer-Breakfast remarks? Well before Dr. Carson addressed the collapse of other ‘pinnacle nations’ before America, through ‘moral decay’ and ‘fiscal irresponsibility,’ an ugly expression enveloped the president’s features, Dorian-Gray style. See for yourself. …

The complete column is “The Other Brother Bedevils Obama,” now on WND.

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