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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

Our Better Nature

Photo: members of a ranibow lorikeet flock


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are Parrots Persons?

Pictures: A mating pair of African Greys and a mother chimp with her 1-month old son


Since we humans are moral animals, every relationship we take seriously forces us to grapple with questions of right and wrong. We have moral relationships with our parents, our life partners, our children, our peers, our government, our earth and —hopefully— our companion animals.


When we treat people like objects and see them as an alien other rather than as a brother or a mother, we fail morally. We stereotype and prejudge, empathy atrophies, and our worst xenophobic, sexist and speciesist sentiments emerge. We abandon creation and become “monsters.”

Taking Shanti seriously as a fellow being raises moral questions I’ll explore on the blog from time to time.

My point of departure—the first item of serious business—is to ask myself if Shanti is an object.

If my answer is yes, there is "nobody home" inside Shanti, then I suppose I might as well cook him for dinner. If animals are mere objects of our dominion designed for our recreation, experimentation and commercialization, they why not hunt the foxes, dissect the chimps, chain up the circus elephants, militarize the dolphins, and use all the spare parts for feathered hats, fur coats and perfumes?

But if my answer is no, somebody is home, I also have to ask the question. Who? And how shall that somebody be treated?

I wonder about that sacred quality of animal someoneness. (A sense of wonder is, I think, a good start. That’s where children start with animals and where I —a half century from childhood— have ended up.)

The philosopher Thomas Nagel explored animal “someoneness” in his essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” He concluded that although we can’t really know what it’s like, it’s like something: Somebody is home.

Peter Singer, who co-founded the Great Ape Project, suggests our fellow apes – the bonobos, gorillas, oraguntans and chimpanzees – deserve the status of “persons.”

Spain recently passed legislation protecting the rights of great apes to life and liberty, a giant step toward recognizing our primate cousins as persons.

All subsequent questions about ethics and animals are, I think, derived from the fundamental one that someone else is home. Not just us humans.

In my short relationship with Shanti, hard ethical questions have already come up. Should a bird from the African rain forest ever live in captivity in California? Should I acquire a baby bird from a parrot breeder when so many unwanted adults parrots need rescue and rehabilitation? Do breeders do good by discouraging the illegal poaching and smuggling of endangered species of native birds? Or do breeders do harm by marketing birds they know will often be mistreated, abandoned or neglected?

I don’t have the answers. But sometimes just asking the right questions helps us do the right thing. What do you think?

Animal consciousness

The holy grail of modern philosophy is the problem of consciousness (a.k.a "the hard problem"). Some philosophers and scientists study non-human animals in pursuit of insight about mind in general. Most now agree that consciousness and self-awareness are not limited to human beings. Other great apes, dolphins, elephants and yes -- birds -- have consciousness, albeit of a different kind, than human beings.

Animal consciousness is mysterious, among other reasons, because non-human animals don’t possess human language. Because we can't talk to other species of animals, confirming what they know and feel is challenging. Recent research has proven, however, that some animals -- like parrots, chimpanzees and gorillas -- can learn to communicate with people by using sign language and learning speech. These creatures may help us understand the scope of animal consciousness. But for now we mostly wonder, and wondering is wondrous.

Anyone can join the animal consciousness research project: just contemplate in amazement. No one has the answers yet, and your intuitions and discoveries are worthy of consideration.

Something I often consider is animal rights. To what extent can we interfere with an intelligent animal's life and liberty? Can we own them? How deep is our responsibility to protect them?

Shanti is still a baby, but I'm already trying to interpret his behavior as reflecting his emotions and his mind. Most Congo African Greys don't begin to talk before they are a year old. But Shanti already communicates with his body language and an array of sounds: a telephone ring, a microwave beep, a few hoots and wolf whistles.

He's very endearing and has bonded with the whole family. But the life of a parrot in the wild is dramatically different from the life he'll have here in my home. The life of an African Grey in the rain forest of Central Africa in a flock of 500, flying at 60 KPH, can never be given back to Shanti. We'll have to make the best of what we have. Together.