Animal Intelligence
As the owner (and an advocate) of avian pets, I have always been impressed by the studies that are being done on parrots to discover the limits of their intelligence.Our current avian family-friend, who will probably outlive me, is Dren. Dren is a 3.5 year old Blue and Gold Macaw, and is constantly charming us with his 3-year old mentality. Anyone who has ever bird-sat for us has discovered that he loves to play "Try and Put Me in My Cage", can undo all of the locks on his cage (which is why they are now pad-locked), and has a constantly growing vocabulary.
He'll never have the vocabulary of Alex, who is pictured above, but he certainly does understand some amazing concepts.
For instance, he has discovered how to dump his food bowl. If it was a generic food bowl, most people would go "No biggie". Dren's bowl actually screws on, and then "locks". To unlock it, he must climb underneath it, and rotate the wing-nut until it aligns with the holes (not all the way, just until it lines up), and then push up. Once he has pushed it out of the locking wing-nut, he crawls back up and finishes pulling it up ... then throws it. But, he won't throw it if it's full. That would be wasting food (and there are starving birds somewhere!) He only dumps it when he's eaten / played with all of it.
Although, I find the monkeys who will pay to see female-monkey bottoms quite humorous. It makes me wonder about monkey entrepreneurs err ... pimps.
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