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.