A parrot’s imprinting with a human surrogate follows a predictable script: utter fidelity expressed through its natural mating behaviour. Unlike dogs, which parted from their grey wolf ancestors about 30,000 years ago, and house cats, whose domesticated origins are murkier and perhaps even more ancient, a pet parrot, no matter where it is born or how tenderly hand-raised, is a wild animal. A sustained historical encounter with people has profoundly shaped canine and feline behaviour and physique. But apart from introducing a few new colour schemes through mutation, human interaction with parrots hasn’t changed so much as a beak or a foraging technique. A human-weaned parrot — ‘psittaciformes’ is the parrot’s scientific nomenclature — is tame, but its behavioural repertoire is still wild, a true descendant of the dinosaurs. Thanks to our selective breeding, dogs and cats not only have infantilised behaviour but also neotenised faces — the big baby eyes and cute snub noses that stimulate our nurturing impulses and flood our brains with feel-good oxytocin hormones. Parrots have none of that. [...]
And yet many people forge a profound bond with birds, and love their winged animals with a fiercely felt reciprocity. This is especially true of parrots. Talk to dedicated parrot owners, especially owners of the bigger parrots, and they will tell you that their avian relationship has changed their lives. ‘I like birds for their flights and non-flights,’ wrote the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. ‘For their diving into waters and clouds. For their bones filled with air.’ There is, undeniably, something paradoxical about our love affair with birds. [...]
Another study, published in 2006 in the journal Anthrozoös, found that people who prefer birds (and horses) have a higher level of empathy than owners of other pets. Researchers at the University of California in the 1990s found that bird owners are more polite, expressive, and caring than other pet owners. Other recent surveys — see Anderson’s 2003 paper ‘A Bird in the House’ — have concurred, finding bird owners to be everything from contented and courteous to unpretentious and, in the majority, communally minded and altruistic. Research has also found that bird-companionship to be a deterrent to suicide, and many parrot owners make formal provisions in their wills for posthumous care. [...]
The most famous investigation into parrot intelligence was the eye-popping research of Irene Pepperberg, adjunct professor of psychology now at Brandeis University, into the psychology of Alex the African Grey Parrot, a bird described as having the cognition-levels of a dolphin, or the intelligence of a five-year-old child. Alex had an extraordinary ability to communicate and reason using sophisticated human language and a vocabulary of 150 words. He had the ability to understand, in his own way, the very advanced conceptual idea of nothing. ‘Alex has a zero-like concept; it’s not identical to ours but he repeatedly showed us that he understands an absence of quantity,’ wrote Pepperberg in 2005 in an email in the journal LiveScience.
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