Okay, I want to meet N'Kisi. He is a captive grey parrot who lives in New York and has an impressive English vocabulary. It's estimated that N'Kisi knows and uses 950 words. To give you a context, about 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English. No, N'Kisi cannot read, but he has shown a remarkable ability to put words together. This defies chance use of what he has learned -- he isn't just "parroting" what he has been taught. He had seen photos of Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees and when Goodall came to visit he greeted her with "Got a chimp?" He describes his owner"s aromatherapy oils as "pretty smelly medicine."
Why does a precocious parrot matter? As a professor of veterinary medicine put it "The more we look at the cognitive abilities of animals, the more advanced they appear, and the biggest leap of all has been with parrots." This challenges the Cartesian notion that animals are not sentient beings like humans and that we can do as we choose with them for our benefit. If they are created by God as we are created we will treat them with the respect they deserve.
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