Alex & Me by Irene M. Pepperberg.
I chose this book after enjoying reading the other great ‘pet’ books featured on this site about the cats: Dewey the library cat, and Casper the comuting cat, – and because it was sure to be interesting given that a cockatoo is part of my family.
Irene Pepperberg is a scientist who had a difficult and lonely childhood. She became a birdlover after being given a baby budgie just after her fourth birthday. The little bird became her friend, playmate and confident until his death, and was followed by a succession of parakeets, some of whom could talk. Not surprisingly, after reading ‘Dr. Doolittle’ Irene Pepperberg daydreamed a lot about being able to talk to and understand animals’ speech and thoughts.
With a promising career in Chemistry, possibly as a university professor, ahead of her Irene discovered that her real passion was biology and the study of human-animal communication. You can read about the many challenges she faced throughout her career, and be captivated by the antics and achievements of Alex, the African Grey parrot who was her work colleague.
At a time when human-animal communication studies were done using chimpanzees, and the scientific wisdom of the time insisted that animals were little more than robotic automations mindlessly responding to their environment, Alex and Irene revolutionized the way that the world thought of animal understanding – partly because Alex could communicate with words to prove what he knew.
Alex learned more than 100 words including numbers, shapes and colours, and he proved that he understood concepts such as bigger, smaller, more, fewer and none. These were staggering achievements for a ‘birdbrain’. Alex established himself in television shows, scientific reports and news articles. He took great delight in ordering the new students around with ”Want corn”, “Want nut”, Want shower”, and other demands. Later learned by himself that “I’m sorry” could be used to defuse tense and angry situations. Occassionally he would obstinately make up his own words to label something, as when he instisted that apple was ‘Baneery”. Thinking that Alex was being deliberately obtuse, Irene said to Alex “Ap-ple“, emphasizing the second syllable. Alex paused a little, looked intently at her, and said “Ban-erry“, mimicking her exactly. He startled them all by learning to sound out the spelling of words – during a lesson, he asked for a nut. Being pressed for time, and not wanting to waste it with Alex eating nuts, they told him to wait. Alex got more and more frustrated asking for a nut, and finally looked at Irene and said “Want a nut. Nnn…uh…tuh. They were stunned, as he had only just started learning letters and their sounds.
Alex picked up a phrase from the students who, during training, would say to him, “Come on, Alex, pay attention!”. During a stay in hospital, Alex would remind staff when a treatment which he disliked was finished and he could be returned to his cage with “Come here. Wanna go back!” On one occasion there was a delay, and the staff called out to Alex “Wait a minute, we’re busy”. Alex came back with “Pay attention! Come here. Wanna go back!”
Science demands many tedious repititions of each achievement to “prove” that they were not coincidence, and Alex naturally became bored with this. He would play his own games by offering every anwnser except the correct one. One day when asked to demostrate numbers for a visitor, Alex gave them a wry look and answered “One” to the question ‘How many green wool?’. When the question was repeated, Alex answered “Four”. The answer was two, but Alex kept alternating one or four, and it was not until Alex was told sternly that he was having time out, and was put in his room that he was heard shouting “Two…two…two…come here!” from behind the closed door. Irene and her visitor cracked up laughing.
It was with great saddness that Alex was found dead in his cage at the young age of thirty-one. Irene was heart-broken, and completely overwhelmed by the newspaper, magazine, radio, and television interviews that let the world greive with her. His death was covered by every major newspaper, and eminent magazines such as the Economist. His obituary followed straight after Luciano Pavarotti’s, Ingmar Bergman’s, and Lady Bird Johnson’s in the Economist.
Alex’s last words to Irene were ‘You be good. I love you’.
Alex was very influential in some vegetarian circles. A lot of Western vegetarians had been hitting this “meat robot” view of animals since the Victorian era, and to have animals who could clearly talk and understand speech, but who were not great apes, helped popularise the sort of sliding scale of sentience view which is now popular.
Before that, there was a lot of human threshold thinking. Now there’s a lot of “Is it that this animal really is a meat robot or is it just that it doesn’t have the party trick of mimicking my speech?” It’s done great stuff for animal welfare campaigns to be able to show people that even non-mammals have some sort of self-awareness, even if we aren’t quite sure what the parameters of it are.