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.

Hope and Change for Parrots and Other Sentient Beings?

The more I learn about the commercial parrot trade, the more gravely concerned I become about the future of these animals, both in the wild and in captivity. There has been progress in the protection and preservation of wild parrots and some endangered species have even been rescued from extinction. But native parrot habitat continues to disappear at a rate far beyond alarming and as Mira Tweeti explains in her brilliant book , the plight of captive-bred parrots like Shanti is grim. Parrots are daily abandoned and mistreated and the few rescue facilities that exist are understaffed, underfunded and overwhelmed.

We need to begin to look at parrots and other animals from their, not our, point of view. Deep empathy and compassionate listening must extend to animals as well as people. This is an easy concept to articulate, but it’s immensely hard to put into practice.

We are as gods to the beasts of the field and the fish of the sea— an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient deity, but not a benevolent one. We bring animals into sentience for the sole purpose of killing them. We raise and slaughter billions of animals every year just in the United States. We create to annihilate.

Factory farming is an economically unsustainable practice that degrades the environment on virtually every level: pollution of the air, global warming, fuel inefficiencies, desertification, extinction of species. You name it. Human meat and dairy consumption are toxic to the planet. Factory farming brutalizes us as it destroys us; we are desensitized to the suffering of animals as we commit global environmental suicide.

Our world is presented to us as if designed for man. But there is no reason to believe that is so. The assumption that evolution culminates in homo sapiens is false. We know it to be false. We know there is no evidence that human interests are superior to monkey or giraffe or trout interests, but we have inherited and constructed a world based on this false premise.

Is another way possible? Is there an alternative to our radical presumptuousness? Is there something other than taking our supremacy and centrality for granted? Is there a way out?

Incrementally we may make progress. Just as human rights have emerged and evolved over the centuries, so too may animal rights. Human slavery, for example, though not eradicated, has been condemned and outlawed by virtually every nation on Earth. Animal welfare has emerged as a public concern of civilized people over the past two centuries, and it has always been a consideration for thoughtful people.

While we are a long long way from ceasing to view animals as commodities and a longer way yet to granting them the fundamental rights they deserve, our values are gradually changing. The conversation has begun; the questions have been raised.

Prof. Cass Sunstein is President Obama’s nominee for director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has also been mentioned as a possible future Obama choice for the US Supreme Court. Sunstein is extremely fluent in animal rights discourse. He has written, “There can be no question that the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals is now being fundamentally rethought.”

Top 10 Reasons for Never Buying a Parrot

I’ve written a lot about the many joys of life with Shanti. Here, however, are a few of the hard truths you should know before acquiring a parrot.

1. You don’t own a tropical forest. You can no more simulate a parrot’s native habitat in your home than you could simulate a European vacation by putting a human being in a dungeon on the moon and giving her a plastic replica of Big Ben.

2. You don’t socialize with hundreds of other parrots. A parrot in the wild spends its entire life among its flock. Parrots are highly social animals and are never alone in nature. Never.

3. Although the importation of wild parrots to the US and Europe is outlawed (a good thing), domestic breeding of parrots is widespread and millions of parrots have been raised for sale as pets. Breeders profit from producing and distributing parrots even though they know the birds will inevitably end up in inadequate—if not horrific and abusive—conditions.

4. Breeder parrots have a horrible existence. They are confined for life, in isolation, often in darkness, with only one other bird. The pair is coerced into copulating and mass-producing as many offspring as possible. If they fail to perform optimally as baby-parrot factories, they are killed.

5. Any parrot you buy in the US or Europe will have been stolen at birth from its parents, who are devastated by the loss.

6. Any parrot you buy from a breeder will have been deprived of even minimal parental care and nurturing. Mine was taken from his parents before he opened his eyes. This practice is promoted to the public as “hand-feeding,” a technique that is supposed to produce happier, better-adjusted, less aggressive parrots.

7. Parrots don’t like living being locked-down indoors, dependent on the schedule, moods, whims, health and stability (or lack thereof) of their human companions. They like living in a cage about as much as you and I would.

8. The essence of a bird’s life is flight. Even if you refrain from clipping your bird’s wings and build her a beautiful aviary, you can never re-create the freedom of flight in her natural habitat.

9. Your captive parrot will never do what s/he was designed to do: find a lover, mate and raise babies. S/he will be celibate and alone from birth to death, which might be fifty years or more. No love, no sex, no parenting, no descendants.

10. In its fifty-year lifespan, your parrot is almost certain to pass through several human hands. Your best-laid plans for his/her welfare are nonenforceable by law and likely to be blithely violated by future “owners” of your parrot. Your parrot has no rights, no legal protection and will have to be extremely lucky to avoid abuse and abandonment.

If you must get a parrot, take the high and hard road. Adopt one that already been abused, abandoned or rescued.

If you’re like me and found out the truth too late, or knew it and went ahead anyway, love and cherish your parrot forever.

Mallards on Lake Casitas; Shanti at Home

There were a pair of male mallards on the shore of Lake Casitas today, dunking their iridescent green heads in limpid water. There seemed to be a joy intrinsic to their gesture, but perhaps I was only projecting the happiness I felt in contemplating duck beauty. Either way their grace was a kind of gift, a gratuitous blessing from innocent avian to obsessively curious and dangerous Homo sapiens.

I watched the redwings in the reeds -- the vultures, herons and egrets overhead.

A vulture flew across the hillside where white-tailed deer graze. He made two or three robust wing flaps, but mostly coasted three hundred meters, braking abruptly at the end to make an effortless landing high in a eucalyptus, instantly at rest, nestled in for approaching dusk.

These simple activities of wild birds are magical to us humans, sunk deep in our alienation and wonderment. We admire the sublime fitness of a bird in its natural habitat. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have come to this: the happy dunking of the yellow mallard beak in the lake water, the long glide of Cathartes aura, the snowy egret perched silently on one leg in high grass.

We intuit that there is a perfect pleasure – a clarity -- for these beings; we sense that they luxuriate in their biological niche.

But such perfection is forever denied to Shanti and to all our companion animals. Try as we might, we cannot recreate the African rain forest in our cities, farms or suburban homes. At best we become a homely and artificial surrogate flock for our birds.

Bred in captivity, there is no going back to nature for Shanti. Fed from birth by human hand, Shanti has no mother and father parrot, no social relationships with parrot kin, no future parrot lover or parrot babies hatching high in a forest tree.

We superpredator humans who bend and twist the biosphere to hold us anywhere, anytime, anyhow underestimate the sacred hold of native habitat on our fellow-creatures. Once we left the savannah to conquer the planet, our sense of home became more abstract and malleable; we forgot that other species cannot adapt as easily as we.

For a parrot, no house of steel can ever replace rain forest. No store-bought bag of treats and seeds can match the naked splendor of fresh seeds, berries, nectar and nuts.

I have brought Shanti into my world to enrich my life -- a world in which Shanti can survive, and I hope, somehow flourish. But it is finally a human world in profound debt to parrots and to countless other sentient species we have violated and molded.

What a gift our companion birds give us, what a sacrifice they make. Our debt to them can be repaid only in love, kindness and perpetual protection.

Photo: An African Grey at one-day old, hatched in an incubator.

Preaching to the Birds

"Thereupon St. Francis went up naked into the pulpit, and began to preach so marvelously of the contempt of the world, of holy repentance, of voluntary poverty and of the desire of the celestial kingdom, that all they which were at the sermon, men and women in great numbers, began to weep very bitterly, with wonderful devotion and compunction of heart…"

The 12th century Italian mystic, St. Francis, is said to have preached to the song birds of Assisi. The image of the barefoot friar talking to the forest animals is spellbinding. For hundreds of years, Francis has inspired artists and charmed the meek of the Earth, especially children.

What can it mean for a man — a purported spiritual genius— to preach to birds? Perhaps it only means he understood them deeply, as Jane Goodall understands chimpanzees, as Mark Bekoff understands coyotes and as Irene Pepperburg understands African Greys. Perhaps when villagers saw Francis “preaching” he was just communicating attentively in compassion and respect.

The traditional view of the church is that Francis was teaching the birds human morality. But such an interpretation, consistent with the view that the pyramid of creation has “man” (in God’s image) at the top, seems at odds with the saint’s radical compassion and creativity.

Francis was a visionary who sang joyously on his pilgrimages through the Italian countryside, nursed lepers, gave away his father’s riches to beggars, mediated between Crusaders and Muslims, and became a lifelong barefoot mendicant. Such a person seems more likely to have been an iconoclast who questioned conventional notions of morality than a priggish conformist who enforced them.

Was Francis a pedant and a fanatic who tediously urged animals to tame their desires and behave more like Christians? Or was he so connected to the feelings of both humans and non-humans that he felt compelled to genuinely interact with his fellow beings rather than to hunt, domesticate and exploit them? Did Francis simply include the birds, sheep, wolves and donkeys in his community, his flock? Is it blasphemous to think that he —like us— was shocked and dismayed by the mistreatment of animals?



Francis is the patron saint of animals. Children take their pet pigs and kitties and parrots to church to be blessed in his name. But what would it mean for adults to take “preaching to the birds” seriously? Would we change our attitudes and behaviors? Would we, like Francis, approach them in humility, wonder, grace and poverty – in loving relationship to other beings?

“All these people accuse you and curse you,” Francis said, “But brother wolf, I would like to make peace between you and the people.”

On his deathbed Francis thanked his donkey for a lifetime of service. The donkey, according to legend, wept. The story may well be apocryphal, but its theme – that animals experience grief and other deep emotions and that Francis was intensely aware of animal feeling and consciousness – still moves us and instructs us, almost a millennium later.

Our Better Nature

Photo: members of a ranibow lorikeet flock


I see wild birds every day. All I have to do is look out the window. Crows, sparrows, mockingbirds, and hummingbirds abound. I also try to spend an hour a day among the native species at the beach in Ventura or at Lake Casitas, our local reservoir.

Walking along the shore, looking out to Anacapa and Santa Cruz Islands, I see scores of gulls, terns, sandpipers, pelicans and cormorants. At the lake, there are colonies of black vultures in the eucalyptus trees, redwing blackbirds in the reeds; herons, ducks, grebes, geese and hawks on the water and in the skies.

On the day we brought Shanti home I saw a Great Blue Heron flying westward with a pair of egrets. A moment of great natural beauty. Superstitiously, I took it as a good omen. More profoundly, I took it as an opportunity to ponder the legitimacy of keeping a wild animal as a human being’s companion.

I’ve always had serious reservations about taking an animal from the wild. What was the point? What was the justification? I had no need to own a bird, a gorilla or a tiger. Nature’s not for owning or leasing; nature’s not for sale. The very essence we value in animals is their wildness, their freedom. Sticking a wild bird in a hominid’s house—or worse, in a cage— seemed too much like taxidermy, self-indulgence and pretense.

Parrots—unlike dogs, cats and farm animals—are not domesticated species, bred over the centuries to serve and gratify people. Parrots are still wild— just a generation or two from the forests of Africa.

“I’m not a poodle,” says the ferociously passionate Shanti. The racoons, owls and coyotes in my neighborhood second the motion.

The only justification for taking a parrot from its perfect wilderness, for separating it from its kindred flock, lies in the sanctity of the relationship between parrot and person. The closer the bond, the more we may justify and legitimize our imperfect intrusion on their lives. Failing to love our parrots, then, defiles nature. But we needn’t fail. Our better nature is to love.

How And Why Shanti Came Into My Life

I’ve always been fascinated by the beauty of birds. Penguins or pigeons, herons, woodpeckers, hummingbirds or coots, I love them all. They bring me joy, often suddenly and unexpectedly. Birds are among life’s greatest gifts of healing, restoration and peace. They reward contemplation with healing, restoration, peace and awe.

I’m also a lifelong student of languages; I’ve always earned my living with words--as a teacher, a writer and a translator. And I’m a passionate student of philosophy.

An avid birder, a linguist and an amateur philosopher? You might think the confluence of these passions would make me the perfect match for an African Grey parrot—an extraordinarily intelligent and emotive bird that has surprisingly advanced linguistic capabilities.

But I won’t kid you (or myself.) I didn’t bring this Congo African Grey (Psittacus erithacus) into our home because birds are beautiful, parrots talk, and I’m interested in philosophy. I got Shanti because of my own emotional needs. I’m 61, my two daughters are grown up, I've retired from classroom teaching career, and I miss nurturing the young. My wife and I want grandchildren someday, but in the meantime, I spend a lot of time at home alone during the day. I’m lonely.

Living with a companion animal is something I need spiritually and emotionally, but I am also committed to Shanti's physical, emotional and spiritual needs.

Shanti isn't a pet, and he isn't a surrogate human. He's a fellow being. I'm part of his flock, and he's part of mine.