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 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.

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