How to Touch a Crow's Mind

What does it take to get into the mind of a crow, a panther, a parrot, a squirrel? A little bit of faith, imagination, empathy, respect, spontaneity and patience.

You need to bring your critical intelligence and be ever-vigilant because the risk of anthropomorphizing is high. Our default assumption is that they are just like us. They're not.

You need a childlike intensity to “get” a duck, a tiger or a raccoon because wild animals never develop the repertoire of intellectual defense mechanisms of adult humans. They have no sense of irony; they are deeply serious even when at their most playful.

But most of all you need detachment from human affairs. You must be carefree - if only for a moment - and deeply attentive to the utter otherness of the animal. By abandoning your terms of engagement you can understand a seal on hers or a gull on his.

Animals are free of the autobiographies and ideologies that permeate human consciousness. To understand them we most leave our life experiences, our memories and our philosophy behind. We appreciate our interaction with animals so deeply because they remind us of our abdicated freedom.

By admiring animal consciousness, we allow the creature to teach us about herself and about ourselves. That is the essence of our interactive wisdom and beauty. That is why we can often love each other.

We never know with certainty that we have touched animal consciousness, although we can be certain that our touch is incomplete. The whole remains mysterious after our encounter. We return to human affairs with no empirical evidence, with empty hands but with a blessing and an enriched spirit.

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.

Animals are not Accidental

We are immersed in a culture of exploitation of animals. How did we get there? It wasn’t an accident.

Often when good conscience demands profound cultural change, we mistakenly think of the status quo as a natural state of affairs. You don’t have to be religious to think that way; you just have to be human. We people tend to like stability and a system of values we can view as good, true and enduring.

Racial segregation in the Southern United States seemed in the first half of the 20th century to be just the way things were, always had been, and ought to be. Women throughout much of modern history were expected to do the housework and obey their husbands. Homosexuality was viewed as perverse, immoral or insane because love between same-sex couples simply wasn’t “normal.”

Similarly, our laws and foundational values regarding non-human animals are also taken for granted as part of the “natural” world. As we did with blacks, gays and women previously, we view animals as social constructs in addition to being sentient beings over whom men have dominion.

But there is no natural and normal way things have always been for animals. We people have decided – based on our interests and our ignorance– what animals are: property.

As a culture, we view animals as among the things that are subject to ownership, like land, lamps, cars and chairs.

Just as this property notion has changed for slaves and women, so can it change for animals. In fact, it is changing. We have come to a grudging acceptance of the protection of animals on wildnerness preserves. There, they may have a home where they are not subject to capture and property claims (although they are certainly subject to anthropogenic environmental impacts).

Outside of the shrinking and threatened wilderness and outside the emergency provisions of laws like the US Endangered Species and Marine Animal Protection Acts, however, animals are still subject to property law and regulation. We claim animal carcasses by hunting, fishing, breeding, capturing and -- above all-- mass-producing them for slaughter in the meat industry.

Let’s make a little progress every day. Here’s one example of an animals rights advance stemming from a horrifying tragedy:

WASHINGTON (Feb. 24, 2009) — Eight days after a chimpanzee kept as a pet attacked and critically injured a Connecticut woman, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, H.R. 80, introduced by U.S. Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., to stop interstate commerce in primates as pets. The bill passed by a vote of 323 to 95. The bill now moves for consideration to the U.S. Senate, where the effort to pass the legislation is being led by U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and David Vitter, R-La.

The Humane Society of the United States and the Humane Society Legislative Fund expressed thanks and appreciation to Reps. Blumenauer and Kirk for introducing the bill, and to Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee Chairwoman Madeleine Bordallo, D-Guam, and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.V., for their leadership in bringing the measure to the House floor so expeditiously.

The effect of this law is to make the private ownership of primates illegal. They will still be used in medical experiments, but they won't be kept as pets. Fewer will be exploited.

Genesis and Animal Rights

God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. —Genesis 1:20-21

It’s low tide and the birds are abundant. I am awake to gulls and sandpipers, in awe of unknowable animal consciousness.

The journey to justice, dignity and rights for nonhuman animals begins in humble contemplation and wonder.

It’s almost always imprudent to make pronouncements about the limits of science. What once seemed inscrutable and hopelessly beyond comprehension has turned out—time and again—to be knowable, accessible and of vast practical consequence. The progress of scientific knowledge and the development of new technologies are so fast and vast that it would be foolish to make predictions even 10 years out, much less than 100, 1,000 or 10,000.

If I had a crystal ball I wouldn’t be surprised to find in the blink of an eye at the end of the 21st century enormous advances in addressing the problems we face today: global warming, overpopulation, degradation of the environment, disease, ageing, world hunger and war. We may have much longer human lifespans, colonies in space, brain-boosting drugs and a world running on energy sources we’ve barely begun to develop today.

Of course, dystopian outcomes are also possible. We may fail to address climate change; we may blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons; we may be wiped out by a virus. We may be too aggressive, xenophobic, reckless or unlucky to survive.

But whether the next century brings us peace and prosperity or misery and megadeath, animal consciousness will remain largely impenetrable to us. What it’s like to be a fox, a bat, a dolphin or a parrot will remain both wondrous and distant.

We may gain enormous knowledge of the psychology and biochemistry of other animals, but we won’t grasp their inner life. The species barrier will remain. Intersubjectivity—communion—is beyond science.

Although we can communicate with animals, we’re too different to share an inner world. We cannot experience camels and eagles or even fellow Great Apes the way we experience other human beings. We don’t share body and mind with other species. Thus, our communion with them is the stuff of intuition, deep empathy and ultimately, the imagination.

But don’t despair. The intersubjective gap can be filled by love and respect. When we stretch our compassion, our imagination and our awareness, we learn that somebody is home in animal sentience. We don’t quite know who or what she feels, but she’s there. On the inside. Sacred. Alive.

When we contemplate living creatures like these gulls and sandpipers we find them lovable; and our capacity for love expands to meet them. That is awe. That is wonder.

Radical wonderment is the message I take away from the Biblical creation myth – not that man has dominion over the animals, but that “God” saw Creation in wonder. “God saw that it was good.”

God—the contemplator-in-chief—saw the sandpipers, the dolphins, the parrots and every creature in the wondrous intuitive light of empathy.

This is a light, I believe, that will eventually guide us to reject dominion over animals and honor their rights. Let there be light.

Paradigm Shift: Animals Have Their Own Interests

During a lull in the heavy rain I watched a dozen White Egrets in the grass south of Lake Casitas. Two families of deer were prancing on the hill above them at the forest’s edge, no doubt delighted with the replenishment of the grasslands. Across the road stood a solitary, statuesque Great Blue Heron. I carried with me an essay explaining how it is that we come to own wild animals. When the rain started up again, I went home to pet and hold Shanti, the 9-month old wild animal I live with. He's starting to greet me with “Hello.”

The dominion we grant ourselves to exploit every living creature on Earth is regulated exclusively for human benefit. We have crafted some exceptions to the general rule that animals are ours for the using and killing. For example, animal fights for human entertainment are banned in the United States, and laws against cruelty to animals limit some obvious and egregious abuses. We have also protected some animals through instruments like the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

But for the billions of hunted, slaughtered, tormented and abused animals outside these statutes, it’s basically tough luck. They have little legal recourse. Wolves may be protected from being shot, plowed or urbanized into utter extinction, but only because such protection is viewed as a public (i.e., human) good. Rarely, if ever, are the animal’s own interests taken into consideration.

One problem is that legal theory reserves the concept of rights for “persons.” Animals have no standing in court. As a result of being defined out of the game, animal interests are by definition subservient to human interests.

The paradigm needs to shift. Animal rights must be represented—-first in our imaginations and then in our courts and legislatures--independently of human interests.

Until this happen, no one is safe. Not the herons, not the deer, not the parrots, not the people, not the Earth.

The Magnitude of the Meat Challenge

Every year about 9.5 billion animals are slaughtered to produce food in the USA. That’s about 3 pigs and 266 chickens per second, 24/7, 365 days of the year. Another way of grasping the magnitude of the number is to observe that all the human beings who died in all the wars of the 20th century represent about 1% of the number of animals killed per year in one country, the USA.

How can we calculate the suffering and pain? With an oxymoron ("humane slaughter") and a burp, apparently, because all that flesh winds up on our plates.

Factory farming also causes enormous pain to the environment. Meat requires vastly more land, water and encroachment on native habitats of endangered species than vegetarian alternatives. Meat production pollutes the air and heats the planet. Our descendants may deeply regret their carnivorous heritage.

How does factory farming compare to other means of using and killing animals? By comparison, all the rest is a mere drop in the bucket of blood. We are rightly appalled by the number of animals killed for sport, product testing, hunting, trapping, dissection and fur farming. We are rightly concerned about those animals euthanized in shelters and pounds. We are rightly skeptical of the abuse of animals in medical experiments. But all of the above amounts to about 2% of the 9.5 billion meat deaths per year.

What can we infer from the billions of animal corpses? That if we only focus on the most egregious instances of exploitation of animals like bullfighting, fur coats, dog racing and cosmetics testing, we will barely scratch the surface. We must also address and answer for our massive slaughter of animals for meat. Doing so requires a huge shift in consciousness and culture. It requires that we all pay attention, change our habits and help each other overcome our prejudices, our sloppy thinking and our addictions.

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.”

House Sparrow

It was raining and windy at the beach yesterday, but I felt the need to be with wild birds, so like birders everywhere, I heeded the call, bundled up and trekked on for a bit, leaving Shanti behind.

I followed the willets, terns and Western sandpipers along the shore. The cormorants bobbed on the waves among human surfers; the pelicans flew north to south in silent groups of half a dozen.

It’s always worth the effort to get out among the birds. No matter how exhausted, sad or lonely I feel, the birds and the sea restore me. They pass like angels—winged creatures of light—invariably granting us respite, strength, the capacity to endure another day of outrageous misfortune or shallow mediocrity.

Birds are constant over time. What changes are the human trials and tribulations. What mattered to me a decade or two ago is trivial now. What matters now soon won’t.

Nature, however, is loyal to us, even as we betray, exploit and forget her.

I started bird-watching in Mexico City more than 25 years ago. I remember the very moment the connection was made and the journey began. I sat on the grass in El Parque México, a block from my home, eating a torta and drinking a soda. Suddenly I was stunned by the beauty of a house sparrow, Passer domesticus, a few feet away. The bird didn’t have much going for him. He was a member of a non-native species, a European colonizer; he was shabby and begging for bread crumbs. But it was love at first sight. I was captivated by holiness, elation and love—all contained in a bird.

I rose full of energy and spent the next weeks, months and years learning everything I could about birds. I bought birding guides, binoculars and maps that traced the heritage of generations of birders before me. For years, I spent all my free time observing birds.

Everywhere were birds, and no bird was without grace.

Over the years, my zeal for identifying, classifying and recording every bird has waned. I no longer carry guidebooks or binoculars; I no longer seek rare and previously unrecorded species. Now I mostly watch birds I’ve seen a thousand times—crows, gulls, pigeons, red-wing blackbirds, and species as ordinary as a house sparrow.

Rejoice, for birds are everywhere.

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.

The Sanctity of Parrot Life

In the year 2000 the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and the World Parrot Trust published their “Action Plan.”

Noting that “No other group of birds has been subjected to more exploitation, numerically and financially, than parrots,” the WPT called upon the millions of ordinary people who keep psittacines to “accept more responsibility for the survival of parrots in the wild and the welfare of existing captive parrots.”

I’m one of the millions of ordinary people who live with a parrot, so I’m going to try to do my share.

According to journalist Mira Tweti, author of "Parrots and People," there are between 40 and 60 million companion birds in the USA alone, perhaps half of them parrots. If just 1% of us bird "owners" began to lobby vigorously for the conservation and protection of parrots, we’d have an enormous influence.

But we can’t do it alone. We also need the cooperation of the parrot industry—those who profit from parrots. They includes cage and accessory makers, food suppliers and distributors, pet stores, and of course breeders.

On the conservation side of the equation, 28% of the 330 known parrot species are threatened with extinction. The parrots we love are decimated by the bird trade, destruction and fragmentation of native habitats, and hunting for food, feathers or for crop protection.

Parrots did fine for many millions of years before they ran into people.

Birds in general are perhaps the only living dinosaurs. They survived the extinction events that finished off other dinosaurs because they had the most powerful brains. That made them more adaptable, more capable of prospering in emerging ecological niches.

European parrot fossils have been dated at 54 million years, although modern parrots may be “only” 20- 23 million years old.

Parrots flourish in warm regions of South America, Africa and Australasia. They love the sun, the verdant tropical forest and the open sky.

What got them in the most trouble with us? Their brains, their looks and the fact that we want their land.

But conserving their habitat and outlawing their importation is only half the battle.

We also have the vast responsibility to protect those many millions of parrots who live in captivity.

Most of that job is educational. We need to teach our children that parrots are not commodities, not things. We need to acknowledge the sanctity of parrot life. As awareness increases, we’ll become better (and surely fewer) parronts. We won’t buy and sell parrots on a whim. We won’t release them to fend for themselves or kill them when we get bored with them. We will treat them with the respect we accord to people, to each other. They will join our “each other,” our community of consciousness and conscience.

Illustration: Sinornithosaurus millenii, a flying, feathered dinosaur ancestor of modern birds

Shanti, the Vet and the Seagulls

Shanti left our house today for the first time in six weeks. We went to the vet. I was extremely nervous. My daughter Eva, who’s more of a grown-up about doctor visits, accompanied me.

The main challenge I anticipated was getting Shanti from his house into the carrying cage. Since the good news for inveterate pessimists like me is that things usually work out far better than we could ever imagine, the maneuver went well.

Eva sat in the backseat with Shanti. We covered him with a blanket, and he appeared to go into sensory-deprivation shutdown mode, as if it were the middle of the night.

I flashbacked to when I was two years old, had croup, and my parents rushed me to St. Francis Hospital for an emergency tracheotomy. “Where are we going, Mommy?”

“It’s a surprise,” she replied.

I hoped that if Shanti ended up as traumatized by the vet’s prodding as I did by the tracheotomy, he would do better than I at erasing or repressing the memory. That sensory shutdown mechanism seemed like a nice side benefit of avian evolution.

On the way to Dr. M’s office we saw scores of seagulls on the shoreline. How strange it is to care, I thought, so intensely about one little being like Shanti in the vast context of millions of kindred creatures flying about, vulnerable in the skies, whom I would never care about individually. We live out our short lives mostly in mutual oblivion.

How radically limited is our capacity for intimacy, empathy and bonding. Eva and I have been bonded as father-daughter for 21 years, and now we both love this new and unexpected family member, Shanti. Yet our total bonds are few. Eva—taking imprinting literally— wants tattoos of Shanti and our deceased cat Luna. But the permanence and sanctity of tattooing only underscores the limits of our bonding. How many persons and animals can we bond with before our love is so attenuated as to be meaningless?

Saints are said to feel love and a bond with all humanity. I have my doubts. I’m sure there are people with special powers of empathy – an emotional intelligence far greater than mine. We run across such admirable human beings from time to time – healers, teachers, parents, clergy – who connect deeply with many others. But our empathic IQ has an upper limit; we can only include so many. Most of us who teach or heal learn to establish some emotional distance. Not every student is our child; not every bird is our beloved. Otherwise, our hearts would break. There is too much tragedy to bear, too much pain, too much death. The mass of seagulls must remain an abstraction.

That’s why we need a more inclusive and empathy-based politics to guide us when our emotional distancing kicks in. We need to codify antidotes to our infantile tribal xenophobia and chauvinism. We need a framework of justice and inclusion when love is numb, to teach us responsibility to each other, as if we knew and loved intimately.

We cannot love each individual seagull with the passion we reserve for the beings we hold close. We cannot learn their names, but we can acknowledge their rights. We can protect their species, their skies and the continuum of consciousness.

Whales and Dogs

The fin whale is the world's second largest animal, growing to 27 meters in length (88 feet). It's an endangered species, and the International Whaling Commission has banned its commercial hunting. Iceland and Japan don't seem to care. Fin whales migrate throughout the oceans and live in groups of 6- 10. Like parrots, they sing beautifully. The world population of fin whales is estimated at around 50,000-60,000.

Iceland just announced plans to kill 150 fin whales. You can help persuade Iceland not to do so by boycotting its export products, mostly sweaters, vodka and fish. Find out how you can help here.

If that's too sad, here's some good news from the LA Times on how to treat your depression:

Two researchers from Japan's Azuba University report that dog owners feel the same surge of emotion when looking at their pets as mothers do when they see their human infants. Miho Nagasawa and Takefumi Kikusui studied two groups of dog owners during play sessions with their dogs -- one group was told to make eye contact with their pets; the other was told to avoid eye contact. Those who made eye contact were found to experience a 20% rise in oxytocin levels, while those who avoided it experienced a slight drop in oxytocin. "Oxytocin is known as the 'cuddle chemical' or 'love drug', it has been found to dampen stress, combat depression, and breed trust in humans.

In Memory of Arne Naess, Deep Ecologist

One of the reasons it’s so hard to acknowledge the rights of animals is that we are all complicit in their abuse and exploitation. If we acknowledge our culpability, we’ll feel obligated to do something about it.

But what are we supposed to do? This was the fundamental question that occurred to the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Naess who died in his sleep last week at age 96. He was the founder of the Deep Ecology movement.

According to Naess, there is no absolute answer. Each person must develop her own “ecosophy. ”

Naess thought that once we recognized a truly non-anthropocentric ecology, wisdom would follow. The paradigm would change.

According to Naess, no creature has privileged value in the ecosystem; we are all equal.

Living with Shanti as an equal does shift the paradigm for me. I’m obliged to figure out how a person can live without exploiting a parrot or a pig or a cow or a dolphin. It’s not easy because our civilization is predicated on the notion that human beings are superior to all other beings.

There have been previous human attempts to live without exploiting animals, but in practical terms, such a utopia is impossible.

Jainism, an inspiring Indian religion with 10,000,000 adherents, is based on the principle that all living beings have souls and that all souls are equal. Nonviolence (Ahimsa) is a foundational principle, and Jain compassion extends even to microscopic organisms.

Jains notwithstanding, however, our spiritual concerns for animals are trumped by our perceived anthrosupremacy and our massively invasive technology.

There is no way to take a Hippocratic animal-rights oath to do no harm. Human technology harms animals. Period. We are big, smart superpredators and we’ve developed immense power over the rest of life on Earth.

How then can we reduce the harm we do— the overpopulation, destruction of habitats, depletion of resources, extinction of species, global warming, pollution of air and sea?

Although our concern for animals is different from our human concerns, it must still be guided by humility, austerity and compassion. It makes sense for humans to end world hunger among our fellow humans, but it is scientifically incoherent to advocate the eradication of animal hunger. Some species’ gratification of hunger comes at the expense and demise of other animals. And we, one way or another, are in charge. We will always be making enormous decisions for other species. Some will result in death.

We have a special role in protecting animals not from all harm, but at the very least from the deliberate and unnecessary infliction of pain and suffering.

The first step, I believe, is to take other beings seriously. That's what shifts the paradigm. We must realize we are not superior, and we are not alone.

Photos: South American parrots and a Jain temple complex in India.

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.

Parrots and Sparrows: Why We Care

Last May the World Wildlife Fund reported on the arrests of two recidivist African Grey parrot trappers in Lobeke National Park in Cameroon. The men were likely implicated in the decapitation death of thousands of African Greys. Another parrot thief in Cameroon was arrested with 353 heads and 2000 tails in his possession. Those body parts were apparently destined for a witch doctor who used them as homebrew medicine for the mentally ill.

The trappers cut off the heads of the birds and pluck the tail feathers. The rest of the body is either eaten or left to rot on the ground

Since the live parrot trade is now banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, there’s has been an uptick in dead parrot smuggling. Heads and feathers of dead creatures are far easier to conceal and transport than live, screaming animals.

Authorities suspect the parrot heads go to India and China and the tails to Nigeria.

Why should we care about decapitated African Grey parrots?

Shouldn’t our concern for Africa be reserved for human beings who suffer from high infant mortality, AIDS, malaria and many other treatable, preventable and curable illnesses? Aren’t parrots very low on the priority list? And who are we to criticize Cameroon? Don’t we decapitate a few billion chickens, cows and pigs per year?

Don’t we exterminate wild animals the minute they become pests? Here in Southern California, licensed trappers and hunters are hired to kill cougars, black bears, foxes, bobcats and coyotes. Nobody makes much of a fuss.

So don’t we have vastly more important things to care about than a few dead parrots in African forests?

We care not because parrots are as or more important than children or mothers or tigers or pandas. We care because we ought to and we can. We care because it shocks our sensibilities to exterminate beautiful, intelligent animals. We care because the death of a beautiful being diminishes us. We care because caring elevates our spirit. We don’t need to budget what we care about. We don’t need a prioritized grocery list.

Caring radiates. Caring breeds more caring. Empathy isn’t something you save up for a rainy day. We can spend our empathy every day. Empathy blossoms in the spending. It replenishes itself. You can’t give enough of it away. The more you give, the more you’ve got.

Empathy is never too goofy, never too generous.

Money is finite. Activism is finite. But compassion is infinite. Caring is free of charge.

Jesus got it right when he said that not a single sparrow would fall to the ground without God caring. No creature, no caring is too trivial. Empathy is for everyone. Every sparrow matters. Every African Grey.

Photos are Greys who were rescued in Cameroon. Thanks to the Limbe Wildlife Centre

Empathy, Bullfights and Bullshit

Living with Shanti and blogging about animal rights requires--in the service of honesty-- a re-examination of how blithely I’ve been known to shut down my receptivity to animal suffering in the past. If I can come to understand what stifles empathy, maybe I can also understand how it blossoms.

I’ve been to bullfights. Several times. The last time was in 2001 when we were on sabbatical in Spain. We had front row seats at the cozy Plaza de Toros in Sanlúcar de Barremeda, the town where we lived. The ring was small enough to hear the animals’ grunts, smell their sweat and excretions, and watch them bleed.

One of the matadoras was a beautiful 15-year-old girl named Esperanza whom my daughters knew from their art and crafts class. Her triumph that Sunday afternoon so delighted her family, friends and fans that they carried her out of the stadium on their shoulders, showered with rose petals, vivas and oles, like a princess or a saint. Meanwhile, the fresh meat of the dead bull —considered a delicacy— was sold on the spot to bargain-hunting connoisseurs.

To my daughters’ credit they both hid under the benches for the gory part. But I was enthralled, or pretended to be.

I had convinced myself that bullfighting was an art form, a spectacular celebration of Spanish and Andalusian culture, an operatic display of skill and courage. Are we perverse to enjoy it? Do we have a right to entertain ourselves with ritualized suffering and death?

I now regret being a bullfight dilettante. On some level I knew better. I knew, even as I was charmed by bullfighting, that the “sport” was only separated from Michael Vicks-style dog-fighting by the fortuitous lack of a nationalist cultural support system. And how far is it from human sacrifice, child sacrifice?

I’m not sure how we desensitize ourselves so thoroughly and casually to the suffering of bulls. Perhaps we’re indoctrinated and acculturated at a very early age, the way boys become enamored with guns before they even get to pre-school. Perhaps we so love the culture of flamenco music and the art of El Greco, Velazquez, Goya and Picasso, that we are blinded to the dark side—the cult of the bull. Perhaps we’re intoxicated by the sensuality of the bull killers —, their ballet, their passion, their eroticism. Perhaps it’s because bulls don’t scream when they die. Perhaps we view them as such profound symbols of masculine strength that we expect them to sacrifice their own lives as stoic warrior role models.

Whatever the mechanism of enchantment, it’s effective. Empathy is suppressed; families celebrate together afterwards. Life goes on. Except for the bull.

It’s odd that the spectators don’t hate the bull. He’s not the villain; he’s admired for his character. Yet at the same time, he’s viewed as an unfeeling beast. That’s cognitive dissonance for you. The bull is at once insensible to pain, a mere dumb clump of cells, a prop in a play; yet he’s also a martyr, full of passion, power and virility.

I remember loving cattle as a child. I was fascinated by their smell, sound, color and shape. They seemed so gentle, loving and peaceful. So quintessentially innocuous.

Small children take it for granted that animal life is wondrous, precious and good. How can we protect and sustain that appreciation for a lifetime? Not in the bullring.

Is Shanti a Thing?

I bought Shanti as a piece of property. A thing. Ca-ching! I put him on my credit card and walked out the door with no documentation, no responsibilities, nothing. Nobody asked if I knew the first thing about birds, was a suitable parront, or if I was a zoosadist on a binge.

Nothing prevents me from having Shanti for dinner, setting him on fire, or otherwise tormenting him. Nothing prevents me from giving him away. In fact, birds are the most abandoned pet in the world. People shoot birds for fun. And we factory farm almost 10 billion birds — mostly chickens — annually, killing about a million per hour.

Our animals are immensely vulnerable. We’ve got all the power, and we abuse it.

It is our ownership of animals (or in Biblical terms, our “dominion” over them) that provides us with the fundamental basis for abuse. As long as animals are things, we will continue to do them incalculable harm.

When we start granting them rights, we'll have a revolution in law, culture and relationships. We’ll have a very different planet.

The struggle to expand the scope of rights typically runs into disputes about semantics. When European Enlightenment thinkers began to argue for equality they spoke only of the Rights of Man. The US Founding “Fathers” took "man" to mean white, propertied males. It took us almost 100 years more to abolish involuntary servitude and begin to extend rudimentary rights to African slaves. Then it took another half century to allow women to vote. Today, we are in a civil rights struggle to extend equal rights to same-sex couples, including gays and lesbians in the family of beings with rights.

Animal rights present the ultimate definitional barrier. Opponents argue that only persons can have rights. Only persons are moral agents. Only persons have free will. Only persons can fulfill the responsibilities that are attendant upon rights. Are rights a kind of contract, the terms of which must be agreed upon by the parties? Or can a nonhuman animal also have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

What would it mean to take such an idea seriously and implement it? Let's find out.

The good news is that most people show some sympathy for animals. We love our pets. We abhor cruelty. We deplore waste and gluttony. We support a sustainable ecology, the preservation of the wilderness, the protection of endangered species. We admire animals as a source of wonder, beauty and spiritual sustenance.

But we’re also overwhelmed by the prospect of accepting animals as members of the family of sentient beings. We’re afraid: I’d go crazy being a vegetarian. I’ll die of some terrible disease lab experimentation on monkeys and rats. The economy will collapse without factory farming. My kids will be deprived of their cultural heritage if the zoo stops exhibiting lions and tigers.

We ask, shouldn’t humans be our priority? Yes, of course. If you have to choose between your daughter and your kitten or your mom and you’re her poodle, it makes moral sense to favor the human relationship. If we have to solve the problem of a billion human beings starving or a billion chickens, we'll know how to prioritize. But that’s the wrong way to frame the question. A better way is to ask how can we provide for the needs of our entire family of being, of sentience, of intelligence, of feeling? How can our ethics become all-inclusive? How can we construct a culture that doesn’t sacrifice one set of compelling moral interests for another?

The Martians Are Coming

The January heat wave here in Southern California is probably an indicator of global warming. Catastrophic climate change is the long-range forecast. As for more immediate threats, when the hot Santa Ana winds blow like they’ve been blowing, forest fire is a distinct possibility. Then when the rains follow the fires, flooding and mudslides are likely in the burn areas. If that’s not enough peril for you, there’s always the San Andreas fault line which promises to deliver a major earthquake any minute, decade or century now.

For one glorious afternoon, however, I’m forgetting about impending disaster and environmental collapse. Carpe diem. I’m just enjoying the sunshine at the beach.

Today was a wonderful day in Ventura. Maybe once in ten walks on the beach I’ll get to see dolphins, and today they were especially close—-leaping out of the water, diving, flipping and splashing. To watch fellow mammals as agile and graceful at sea as the dolphins is to realize that swimming with such ease, passion and intensity is as remarkable and alien to us as the flight of birds. Being a dolphin or being a parrot suggests a world of animal feeling so far from our own sensorium that it might as well be on a different planet in a different galaxy. Yet, a million light years away or a hundred meters up in the sky or out to sea, sentient experience is as close to our essence as our own heartbeat. Dolphiness and parrothood are feeling, and all feeling creatures are our kin.

No one would be particularly surprised if the methane clouds reported recently over Mars turn out to be proof of extraterrestrial life. While the Martians are probably microbial, if and when we do find intelligent life in outer space, it will be like us: subjective. What else could it be but something to marvel at, like the dolphins, the brown pelicans and the parrots?



I watch the pelicans flying the coastline in groups of six. They are gorgeous and abundant, full of life. This year, however, they began to turn up dazed and moribund in parks and on suburban lawns. Since they are very sensitive and were once on the verge of DDT-induced extinction, scientists suspected poisoning, exposure to some environmental toxin. But it now appears they were terminally debilitated by a unusually intense winter storm on their way south.

We can’t guarantee the safety of pelicans in the wild to the extent we can protect our companion animals at home. A safe environment for Shanti may protect him from many hazards, but he can’t fly free. Flight, even in a controlled environment, might decrease his security. Inside he’ll have glass, stove tops and ceiling fans to contend with; outside there are hawks, the elements and cruel homo sapiens.

Shanti, who came into my life with flight feathers clipped, has made me think deeply about a bird’s right to fly. Can I clip him again when the feathers grow back? I'm undecided.

I watch the seagulls hover in the warm breeze and I wonder.

Note: The video of swimming dolphins and pelicans flying above was actually taken in Ventura (not by me; I found it via YouTube)

Waking up

I’m getting better at interpreting Shanti’s feelings. It’s relatively easy to tell when he’s fearful, tense or frustrated; fear and anger are the emotions humans are most likely to concede to animals. It’s harder, however, to recognize and acknowledge joy, playfulness and sociability. Parrots are not domesticated dogs who run to greet you, wag their tails and jump up on your lap. For one thing, birds have less expressive faces. But after a while, you learn the beat and can dance to the rhythm of a parrot’s inner glow and joie de vivre.

Why is it important to concede that animals have feelings, emotional experiences and an inner life? Because a revolution in our treatment of animals will follow.

If we begin to ascribe to birds, cows, rats and monkeys the level of awareness we take for granted in our pet dogs, we will dramatically change the ethics of our biosphere. We will be morally obliged to stop making excuses for the depraved indifference we often show to our fellow beings.

Not all life is sentient. The philosopher Daniel Denett has noted that some forms of life, like trees, never wake up. Figuring out just where, when and how sentience kicks in is a challenge for the 21st century. Neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and other disciplines will bring us ever closer to distinguishing animal sentience and feelings from the deep sleep of trees. As that happens, behavioral science will help us communicate with animals. Legal scholars and politicians will develop better laws to protect and respect other beings.

In the meantime, however, the ones who need to “wake up” are us.

We’ve got to do the hard introspective thinking and the heavy lifting of daily interaction with animal life and animal products.

We also need to lobby our educational institutions to emphasize environmentalism, animal rights and ethics in science teaching. Compassionate science, untethered in its pursuit of truth, ultimately can overcome vested interests, prejudices and deeply ingrained biases. Scientists have followed the evidence to tell us the truth about global warming, overpopulation, the toxicity and addictive qualities of nicotine, homosexuality and a myriad of other issues long cloaked in superstition and ignorance. Empowered by compassionate science, ethicists can guide us in interpreting advances and reducing the harm done by prejudice and greed; environmentalists can implement our collective wisdom and understanding; and we can all participate in good conscience. We can become a world of minimal hunting, minimal factory farming, minimal animal experimentation in laboratories, minimal exploitation of animals for entertainment and frivolous consumer goods.

When the Shantis of the world are freer, we too are freer. When they are better off, we too are better off.

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.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Yesterday, I wrote about the dangers of fretting over bird cognitive development as an impediment to enjoying your relationship. Concerns about lagging African Greys are understandable given the extent to which we’ve hyped African Greys with names like Einstein. Then there's the stack of textbooks, scientific publications media attention Alex the African Grey has received. Prof. Irene Pepperberg’s CAG not only made scientific history with his linguistic achievements--proving once and for all that Greys understand language rather than just mimic it-—he was also the first parrot to merit an obituary in the New York Times.




But besides worrying that your parrot or child may not be a braniac there are additional ways to let human anxieties get in the way of a joyous relationship with bird or child.



We owe our kids and our birds a modicum of trust and confidence in their safe and happy futures. If the companions we nurture get infected with our anxiety over their well-being, that can be as debilitating as psittacosis or hepatitis.

Evolution has designed birds and humans to survive. This was a wonderful lesson I learned from the pediatrician who first examined my children and detected my tendency to overthink and overworry all aspects of their health. Dr. Pérez basically told me to chill, that my babies--even Eva who was a four-pound preemie —were healthy and strong. Once a child makes it through the birth canal, has well-functioning organs, five senses on high alert and a rockin' immune system, you can give evolution the benefit of the doubt. This kid's a winner.

Accepting the gift of the presumption of a healthy life for my children -— without any guarantees, of course—- was liberating for me.

Sure, babies can get menengitis, brain cancer, or AIDS. They can drown in the backyard swimming pool. They can be victims of abduction or urban warfare. They might grow up schizophrenic, diabetic or in a lifelong struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction. I’ve seen all of the above. But still, disaster is rare. Most of us will live a half century or so in pretty decent health, or with manageable illnesses/disabilities that won’t significantly impair our ability to lead fulfilling lives.

The same for birds. They can be ravaged by infection or kidney failure. They can eat poison, die in a fight with a house cat or doberman, chew their way to electrocution through the TV cord, land on the stove burner and go up in flames. They can inhale Teflon fumes; or they can get disoriented and fly away, ending up lost and eaten by an eagle or a pack of coyotes.

But these catastrophes probably won’t befall you and your bird. If you simply take a few precautions and give your loved one the fundamental care she needs, chances are good that all your anxieties are for naught. Fretting is in our DNA, but we don’t have to let it take control of our lives.

Think of safety and security, but don’t be motivated by fear. Chronic fearfulness can short circuit your relationships. It’s not good for you, your child or your parrot.

Parronting Advice (for myself)

Whether you’re raising a baby or a parrot, you can risk missing out on much of the joy if you focus excessively on achieving developmental goals or on living up to your own or other’s expectations.

Will Shanti step up on my hand like a good little parrot? Will his first words be precocious or delayed? Will he be congenial and adorable with everyone; or will he be obstinate, withdrawn and defensive? Is he a generous soul who can get along with many humans or tantrum-prone and overly dependent on just one?

I have to remind myself to let the parrot be a parrot, and to leave myself alone too.

A good parent and a good parront can’t be self-flagelating and competitive about their loved one’s development. Let them be a little spontaneous, idiosyncratic, unpredictable and crazy. The price of perpetual parental anxiety is to wake up one day and realize you missed the best part of your animal’s development because you were too busy worrying about it. You risk having children and animals who will view you as too controlling and rigid. Your bird may end up compulsively plucking his feathers, while you’re teetering forever on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Shanti dropped to the floor for a few minutes today, pooped twice on the carpet, scratched at the couch, and eventually inched up to my fingertips and risked a ride home on my hand. It was a glorious moment of trust and excitement, as he flapped his wings mightily, pierced my finger slightly with his nail, and hung on for dear life. I gently placed him on his perch, where he now watches as I type. It’s been a great day. Like every day with Shanti.

Is Having a Parrot Better Than Having a Baby?

Short answer: no. Becoming a father was hands-down the best thing that ever happened to me.

Besides, comparisons between human relationships and animal relationships are not very instructive. We humans and nonhumans simply live our lives together in utter interdependence, with ample opportunities for love among us.

So why are we having this conversation?




Well, caring for Shanti reminds me a lot of becoming a parent 21 years ago. For one thing, this is the first time in two decades that I’m excited about getting up in the morning. That’s a major improvement over dread on a bad day and irritability, procrastination and sloth on all the other days.

Lately I’m waking up with wonder and enthusiasm. I love to clean Shanti’s house, wash his dishes, give him his bath, prepare his food, listen to his wild songs, mumbles and sundry mechanical vocalizations.

I also loved getting up at 6 a.m. for my daughters, Hannah and Eva. I had an analogous routine of changing diapers, making breakfast, adoring their affection, yearning to make sense of their babbling, and striving to alleviate their discomforts.

But in some ways it’s more enjoyable with Shanti. Back in 1987, I was a harried 40-year-old with a stressful full-time job. I was a wound-tight ball of frustrations, ambitions and anxieties about the future.

Now I sleep better, work less, and have finally outgrown the grandiose ambitions. I no longer worry much about getting old and dying, since my generation and I are already getting old and dying. True, I’m still a bundle of petty anxieties, ready to implode and collapse at a moment’s notice over a trifle. But playing with Shanti and basking in his glow helps immensely. Nurturing

Shanti works some biochemical magic on my nervous system, soothing my inner idiots, shaming them into at least temporary exile.

Having a profound relationship with other animals like Shanti and with our human loved ones is a blessing, a healing.

Mark Bekoff says, “Without close and reciprocal relationships with other animal beings, we’re alienated from the rich, diverse and magnificent world in which we live. That’s why we seek out animals for emotional support.”

I seek out Shanti to enjoy and accept the responsibilities of this reciprocity with the animal world. In so doing, I enrich my life and expand the range of my compassion.

The Vultures of Lake Casitas and Cozumel

I Went to the lake today and watched the red, black and grey turkey vultures, Cathartes aura, circling above, celebrating life in the sky—silent in soft breeze, basking in winter sun; slowly gliding to earth and gathering on the water’s edge.

The vultures live long lives. Like Shanti and me.

In flight they spread their zigzagged grey-black wings that span an astonishing 70 inches. Pacifists and environmentalists, they thrive for decades without natural enemies, recycling the biosphere, cleaning up the mess of death.

I’m reminded of a week I spent in Cozumel 22 years ago. One morning I stumbled on a colony of vultures perched in the branches, overlooking heaps of garbage. I had seen ibises, roseate spoonbills, alligators and flocks of gloriously raucous red-lored Amazon parrots on that trip, but the vultures—up close and personal—were especially amazing. They sat hunched in their trees, aloof and dignified in the tropical heat, unperturbed by my sudden entrance, happy in their niche.

I return to Shanti in captivity, in his artificial habitat. My walks among the wild vultures and my memories of the Amazon parrot flock only make me appreciate him more.

I'm grateful to Shanti for his unintended sacrifice of the skies, branches and fruits and nuts of his African forest. Born in captivity, he’ll never experience the perfect fit of his species to natural selection. We owe our birds so much.

Birds are forgiving, as are we until we let our resentments and grudges boil and fester. The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson says, “Forgiveness has a biological foundation that extends throughout the animal kingdom.”

We civilized human being make a big deal of forgiveness, codifying the concept into our value systems and our long-winded religious doctrines. Nonhumans, however, forgive naturally all the pokes, pecks and displacements of outrageous fortune.

How can we repay their trust and boundless affection?

The Snuggles and Cuddles of the Wild Parrot

Late at night Shanti likes to snuggle up in my hand, cuddle and coo. I gently massage his head and neck feathers, his beak, and the delicate bones of his skull and jaw. He will close his eyes, flush with warmth and seem to shudder blissfully. And then there's the sweet afterglow—-for me!

Conventional wisdom has it that Greys outgrow the snuggly phase, but I never will. Our bonding infuses me with a rare happiness reminiscent of what it was like to hold and hug my baby daughters. Hannah and Eva also outgrew the unabashed physical intimacy of infancy, but the bond abides forever.

We jokingly call Shanti my nieto (grandson). But is Shanti really like a baby, a puppy or a kitty? No, he’s like a Congo African Grey Parrot. A wild parrot who’s a wild parrot who’s a wild parrot. I love the deep unknowable mystery of his parrotness, as well as the universal, instantaneously recognizable quality of his love.



Video: An African Grey named Ollie cuddling with a young Homo Sapiens.

Eating Birds

The more I study animal consciousness the more I become concerned about how unconscionably we treat animals.

Although we live our lives in relationship with animals, depend on animals for survival and cherish our companion animals, we often fail to make the empathic connection to the other animals we blithely harm.

Photo: Cornish hens


Ironically, this human failure may also have strong biological roots in our kinship bonds and our instinct to view those outside our kin group and small community as enemies, inferiors or simply objects. Objects we eat.

I’m not a vegetarian. Even though 40 years ago I concluded it was morally wrong to eat meat, I only abstained from doing so for a couple of years. Then I relapsed.

It’s disturbing and demeaning to consciously do wrong. As a moral agent, I believe I should act on my convictions. Being a meat addict is not a valid excuse.

On Christmas Eve we gathered around the dining room table for a holiday meal I cooked: stuffed Cornish hens. Beautiful and beloved Shanti, my Congo African Grey parrot, was literally gazing down on us as we dined and celebrated our holy traditions of Hanukah and Christmas. I felt a twinge of guilt as I stabbed, chewed and swallowed the dead (and delicious) bird. What could be more grotesque, I thought, between sips of wine and holy benedictions.

Shanti may not have a sense of irony, but I sure do. I wondered how I got to this hypocritical point in my meat addiction. I began to consider the convoluted and fallacious arguments I’ve used over the decades to rationalize eating meat. Here’s my top ten list:

Top Ten New Year’s Rationalizations for Eating Meat

1. One person can’t possibly make a difference. If I stop eating meat, I won’t reduce the total number of killed animals in my lifetime even by one. It’s a futile gesture.

2. People eat to live. It’s in our genes, and other animals do the same. Chimpanzees eat monkeys. Owls eat squirrels, bats and ducks. Kingfishers and pelicans eat fish. Fish eat more fish. Why shouldn’t we do what comes naturally?

3. Animals don’t know what death is. As long as we don’t abuse or mistreat them before we kill them, we have done nothing wrong. The animals we eat don’t value individual lives the way we humans do. Individuals of a species are fungible.

4. I need animal protein. At my age, a radical change in my diet might be detrimental to my health and deprive me of the energy I need for all the good I can still do, including promoting animal causes.

5. Vegetarianism isn’t really important in the great scheme of things. It’s a middle class luxury that makes privileged activists feel good about themselves. Our priorities need to be human rights, climate change and ending the wars we wage that cause such immense pain and suffering.

6. Eating meat is culturally important. If I’m puritanical about abstaining from meat, family and friends will have to make special accommodations. I’ll become a pain in the butt to everyone, a self-indulgent prig.

7. A majority of people will never become vegetarians. I should focus instead on the issues of protection and conservation of animals that are realistic and doable. I have a better chance at success by urging people to reject veal crates and paté de fois gras.

8. Cutting down on meat consumption is more realistic than eliminating it entirely. I can eliminate factory-farmed products from my diet and still eat free-range, humanely slaughtered animals and fish.

9. We first need to create a society that’s animal friendly. Our individual practices are not so important. If we educate people about animal consciousness, then no one will want to eat animals in the first place. Future generations will be vegetarian.

10. There’s nothing really “wrong” with eating meat. It’s part of the cycle of life. Life requires life in order to live. Every being on the planet eats the DNA of other beings.

I know, all ten excuses are lame. Maybe I’m hopeless. But that kind of self-deprecating despair just amounts to Rationalization Number 11.

People like me need support to kick our meat habits. Local communities need to create and sustain vegetarian alternatives to meat-based cultures. We need more pro-animal institutions, educators, nutritionists, scientists, technologists and politicians. We need a green and animal-friendly economy with plentiful green jobs that eradicate poverty and expand human and animal rights. Let’s work together in the right direction. Then I’ll become a vegetarian. Right?