Should Have Gotten A Dog

Growing up my family had the typical collection of pets - a couple dogs (RIP Harry), some goldfish, a turtle, a hamster and a couple of parakeets. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary and certainly not noteworthy when you compare it to some of the other animals I have read about people deciding make for great pets, such as alligators they keep in a bathtub or snakes the owner releases into the wild when they get too big. Still, I want it noted on the official record that the parakeets were my sisters', not mine. You see, I have always thought birds were kind of a silly thing to keep as a pet because in my mind a pet is something you can interact with and that is not the case with birds. They just stay in the cage all day and then you get to clean up their crap-covered newspapers every couple of days. I know all pets require some clean-up but at least with a dog you can play with it to make those clean-up times a little more tolerable. Allegedly some people let their birds out to fly around their house but that just sounds like insanity, especially because I remember the couple of times my sisters' birds got out of their cages and it sent my house into DEFCON-1. Anything which causes that much chaos simply by not being where it is supposed to be does not sound like a fun family pet to me. So, unless you are the kind of person who wants to randomly find bird crap on your kitchen counter in reality all birds do is make noise when you are trying to watch TV and live in a cage which takes up space, which makes them more like a decoration than anything. Oh, and this week I learned they can also get you arrested.

The other day I read a news item about a man in Mexico who was driving down the road when he came upon a sobriety checkpoint. The police were looking around the car when a voice from inside the vehicle cried out that the driver was drunk. It turned out that it wasn't one of the driver's friends trying to be cute - it was the man'a parrot. Normally that is where the story should end but the cops took the bird's word for it, gave the driver a field sobriety test and it turns out the parrot was right - he was drunk - and the owner was arrested. Now, considering I just told you that I think normal birds are a strange pet it is not a stretch to figure out my feelings on the ones which learn to communicate. I feel a little bad about this because I should be impressed by them because it is a talking animal. I mean, if a dog learns to bark a noise which sounds even slightly like a word it gets two million views on YouTube, so a bird being capable of independent thoughts and having the ability to express them should be amazing to me, yet I find them annoying. The problem is that parrots have the vocal abilities but no social ones - meaning they don't know how to control the volume of their voices or wait for a break in the conversation to let their opinions be known. They just squawk out whatever comes into their minds the second it happens. If they were humans they would be the people you avoided at parties and the fact that they are animals do not excuse bad behavior. I guess it is possible that the bird was just doing what most parrots do which is repeat things they hear most often which means this guy was not only driving drunk his family thinks he has a drinking problem and was doing Mexico a public service by getting him off the road. Still, if you've got a parrot and you are trying to teach it to talk do us all a favor and teach it some etiquette while you are at it.