The Osprey and the Parrot

I say goodbye to Shanti the African Grey Parrot, assure him that I’ll be back soon, and head out for a walk at Lake Casitas.

Although Shanti is a wild creature, we have a relationship of habits, expectations, memories and routines. We are always on each other’s mind; we enjoy each other’s company; we remember and anticipate. Shanti knows me like he knows no other being; and I know him like I’ve known no other bird. He is an undomesticated animal, but ours is a domesticated, familial relationship—-a mix of human and bird traditions, human and bird love.

A relationship with a unknown wild creature in its natural habitat, however, is very different.

Every few days I have been visiting an osprey who perches high in a dead oak above the lake. Osprey are diurnal raptors. They mate for life, and they may live 25 years or more.

I see the osprey at a distance of 100 yards, through an open field rounded by woodland. A crow is perched on a lower branch of the oak, and a solitary young doe stands halfway between the osprey and me. There is a quick and silent communion of contemplation among the deer, the crow, the osprey and the person. A twig may break at any moment, and all three wild creatures will vanish, leaving the bemused human to his loneliness, his schemes and his mental perturbations.

I meet the osprey’s gaze. I know that afterwards I will reflect on our delicate and stunning field of awareness, and I know the osprey will not. She is a fisher, supremely unconcerned with the lives of crow, deer and people. She is undistracted by my presence, yet not oblivious to the bridge of white light between raptor and person.

There’s a palpable bond of awareness between us that feels to me like love and wonder. It must feel like something to the osprey too. But what? A quality of sentience unstored in memory, pure of all reflection, perhaps indistinguishable from that sense of love and wonder, perhaps its essence.

Shanti and the Whooping Cranes

From our first day together I’ve been able to caress Shanti. He’s an affectionate bird. Often before he goes to sleep at night, he likes to cuddle up.

The first thing you’d notice about Shanti is his communicative attentiveness. He's perpetually checking in, making eye and voice contact. Shanti wants to be in touch, and the feeling is mutual. He is always on my mind, or in the back of my mind. I mind him; he minds me.

From the beginning of our relationship, whenever Shanti did something endearing, I would instinctively utter a soft “oooh,” a monosyllabic and perhaps universal human vocalization, probably recognizable to anyone who has ever held a baby. It’s our human way of expressing love and teaching vowels.

Lately Shanti has been cooing back. My daughter pointed out to me that Shanti’s coo sound is identical to mine. He imitates my “call.” He copies my human intimacy technique, and it works for him-- bigtime on my heartstrings.

I surely inherited my coo-call from my mother who had inherited it from a thousand generations of human parents and perhaps even from beyond the species barrier to our Great Ape ancestors. Now Shanti the Parrot has learned this human cri de couer too. Was it as random as learning the ping of the microwave oven, or as simple as learning my voiceprint, my identity, my name? Or was he really understanding the code for human affection?

Did Shanti choose this sound because it was easy, because it had been repeated so often in his most receptive and teachable moments, or did he want to acknowledge and reciprocate my love? Quoth the raven, Nevermore.

This kind of symbiotic nature-nurture interspecies communication is fascinating. We see something similar in a project designed to help save whooping cranes from extinction. At the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge humans mesh our instincts and our culture to mutual benefit for us and the cranes. In Operation Migration, the critically endangered cranes follow ultralight aircraft to re-establish the ancient migration route that they lost by being hand-raised by costumed humans and hand puppets.




Here our instinct for admiring the grace, beauty and flight of birds is beautifully at work. Our fascination with the technology of flight is derived from our primordial response to the birds who have populated the skies for a 150 million years or so. And now we can apply our infant aeronautical technology --built on our dream love for birds-- to helping the cranes. We guide them home in our planes, and we delight in preserving their lives and their wilderness.

Airplanes, which have delivered so much war, death and toxicity, can also rediscover and recover their bird nature and their original inspiration. It’s all about the cooing. It’s all about love.

Euthanized Cats and the Rights of Birds

Perhaps we need to rethink our ecology of companion animals. Here in Ventura County California, where Shanti and I live, authorities euthanized 1130 dogs and almost 1500 cats last year.

The numbers of euthanized pets are on the rise, despite robust adoption and rescue programs as well as an educational effort to encourage spaying and neutering. ( One can only guess at the number of abandoned or home-euthanized animals whose fates are off the grid.)

In commenting on the problem, Jolene Hoffman, director of the Humane Society here in Ojai, got to the heart of the matter: “People seem to think of animals as disposable.”

There you have it—the notion of animals as property.

Like old sofas or last year’s cell phone, we can dump companion animals and their offspring like garbage.

“An animal should be a lifetime commitment,” Hoffman says. And of course she’s right. But the real paradigm shift is to begin to think not exclusively in our own anthropocentric interest, but also in terms of the animal’s interests and rights. Foremost is the need to change from viewing animals as more junk and clutter to viewing sentient creatures as legal beings.

The right to life is irrelevant to things like water bottles and pebbles and paramount for beings like Shanti and me; so euthanasia of sentient beings should be avoided at all costs.

But what about the right to reproduce? Isn’t that also part of an animal’s interests? And what about the rights of native birds who are maimed, tormented and slaughtered by the billions by multiplying suburban and feral cats? Must all cats be kept inside or declawed in addition to being desexed in order to protect the birds who feed on our gardens and delight in our bird baths?

As Hoffman says, an animal must be a lifetime commitment, but the commitment is also to the quality of life of the animal, the habitat and the planet.

Taking animals seriously raise hard questions. There are multiple complex interests to be balanced. Wolves or sheep? Birds or cats? The right to live or the right to reproduce?

But we can only begin to properly address these issues in the context of animals as feeling beings, not as property. When we elevate the status of animals, we will complicate our lives and add to our responsibilities, but we will also atone for our trillion-fold sins of omission and commission against animals. We will rehabilitate the planet; we will restore our humanity; we will sustain a deep and beautiful ecology.

Shanti is not a Doll

I love Shanti the African Grey parrot.

Human beings fall in love with animals, and our love for individuals—our dogs and cats and parrots—can open our eyes to our responsibility to their species and to all sentient creatures.

When we dismiss our love for animals as childish or as a surrogate for human love, we denigrate our own emotional integrity, we delegitimize interspecies relationship, and we slam the cage door on animal rights.

We have been taught that love for an animal is nearly as frivolous as love for a teddy bear or a doll. But if we are honest and attentive, we will observe that -- just as with human love -- our bond with our companion animals is a response to their intelligence, awareness and generous willingness to engage us.

Once we acknowledge the authenticity of a loving relationship with a non-human, we face a serious ethical challenge: we are obliged to address the logical inconsistency and moral perversity of loving an individual animal while decimating its kind.

Our loving relationship with animals needs to become part of our spiritual discourse. Just as we hope one day to create a world of peace and social justice among humans, we should likewise express our highest ethical hopes and dreams for nonhumans.

We will not end the slaughter of human beings by warlords tomorrow, nor will we end the slaughter of pigs, foxes, deer and seals the day after. But we ought to at least aspire to a world in which we no longer kill sentient beings for food, fur, entertainment or better cosmetics. Our companion animals will show us the way.

Wild As Wild Can Be

Shanti is a wild animal, breed in captivity for human profit and pleasure, sold to the highest bidder: me.

African Grey parrots have not been domesticated for thousands of years like dogs, cats, chickens and cows. They are today the genetic equals of their diminishing and endangered forest siblings, at most a couple of generations from tropical mangrove and savannah. They are wild as wild can be.

We take a parrot from its flock, from its parents, from its habitat. We deny it flight, freedom, mating, parenting and the society of birds. We keep it in a cage. We exercise our ownership and dominion. We take on a casual and temporary responsibility, but when human concerns intrude or when the animal becomes a nuisance, we break our promises. We get on with life; and they suffer, go crazy or die.

It troubles me how blithely and brazenly we invade this creature’s nature, its purpose. We assume – based on nothing but banal arrogance, reckless speciesism and empty assertion – that a life among us is an enviable life. Or worse, we assume that life doesn’t really matter all that much to the dumb creature; for mattering is exclusively human.

Shanti and I have oddly come together—-the 9-month-old Psittacus erithacus and the 62-year-old Homo sapiens. We have become symbiotic, fallen in love. A fate sealed.

Certainly it's a good deal for the grateful human and not the worst that could have befallen the choiceless parrot. But I wonder about the legitimacy of this covenant. We have exerted unwarranted authority when we usurp all the freedom of the wild, all the rights of nature's creatures.