Wibbly-Wobbly Ramblings

[Content note for descriptions of how the two patients died and other descriptions of abuse and neglect.]

[Content note for descriptions of how the two patients died and other descriptions of abuse and neglect.]

if any of you are still in hs, double check the age of consent. I know here in Ontario, Canada, it's 16. At that point, you can consent to your own medical treatment, seek things like diagnosis (if you want/need it) and IEPs. However, self-dx is still valid. Shitty of her to have made you go without resources.

The findings of a South African government investigation point to medical neglect in institutions

orangememesicle, for Autistics Speaking Day 2015 (via autisticsspeakingday)

I want to puke. I keep hearing in my brain, that could have been me that could havebeenmethatcouldhavebeenme. 

Children do not belong in institutional settings, whether you call them centers, rtfs, orphanages, asylums, or nursing homes. They do not. And they do not belong in restraints or holds that are high risk. 

Whenever my parrot flips out and gets angry, I say, “Hey,” in this soft, comforting voice and then talk to him gently. He calms down within seconds.

I just got frustrated enough at something that I went, “ARGH.” My parrot said, “Hey,” all softly and sweetly like a dozen times over the next minute. It made me feel better instantly.

My parrot is better at conflict de-escalation than most people.

Whoa, shit. I guess this would be the post. This had like, 400 notes when it was clogging my activity the other day. I figured all the new followers were because it had reached a couple thousand or something.

Please don’t get a parrot; read this. The reason my parrot is like this is because I drop everything all day to make sure he is emotionally well. He treats me like I treat him. I treat him as if he’s as important and nearly as cognitively and emotionally complex as a human. I put myself in his shoes psychologically and make some adjustments for the kinds of urges and social behavior birds have. Doing anything other than that – underestimating his needs, underestimating his ability to think about the world around him and reach logical conclusions, underestimating his ability to recognize the inherent unfairness of our complete control over him – worked out VERY poorly. Following the advice of bird training books worked out very poorly. 

The first five years or so that we had him, I did not do a good job of ensuring he was emotionally stable because I didn’t understand his needs or behavior as well as I thought I would after over a decade of owning smaller birds. I gave him food and water and toys and played with him, so I didn’t understand why he would act crazy. His personality was MUCH less gentle and my misunderstanding of him drove me to tears many times.

He only became the gentle bird he is because I quit thinking of him as inherently lesser and respected his cognitive abilities more. Parrots didn’t evolve to be intelligent just so they can solve puzzles in the wild, they evolved to be intelligent because social animals have to make inferences about the motives and feelings of other creatures around them. If you try to force them to do too much, or are impatient when you need them to go in their cage, or don’t let them out of their cage when they don’t perceive any good reason for it, or punish them for natural behavior, they recognize how unfair it is. They mistrust you, and dislike you, and they hold grudges. They start to perceive your behavior as petty and unreasonable, and when there’s some complicated human context they don’t understand, they think you’re unpredictable and are on-edge around you. They don’t care if they’re mean to you because you deserve it, and they’re right.

He only got to be this nice because I started asking myself questions: Would I want someone to do this to me? Would I feel comfortable going in my cage for no reason, or would I think that was bullshit and want an explanation first? Would I feel safe willingly going into a cage when a scary human is angry and too aggressive with me, or would that be the LAST thing that would make me feel safe? Would I like someone who talks whenever they want, but then screams at me when I make noise? Would I cooperate with someone who puts a blanket over my cage when I was just trying to socialize with them? Or would I be intensely depressed all the time and scream with anxiety and sadness and hate the very sight of them?

Those are things people do to parrots every day, and wonder why their parrots don’t like them or act difficult. 

Now we are almost always very gentle in tone and demeanor with our parrot. We give him explanations when he has to go in his cage, and we apologize for it and tell him we don’t like to do it but it’s for his own safety, and we praise him effusively for cooperating. It doesn’t matter if he understands the content of what we’re saying, he understands that we respect him and we’re not putting him in his cage to be mean or controlling. He feels like he has some choice. And sometimes if he doesn’t want to go, we just let him stay out a little longer.

Please please please do not get a parrot. It is very hard to try to work out what conclusions a parrot has drawn from an interaction because it’s hard to erase all the human context we take for granted. Very few people have the patience to do that for an animal. 

This post is a great example because my parrot used to be vicious toward me when I was frustrated. For years I didn’t understand why my parrot would get angry at me and try to bite me when I cried. Only last year I realized it was because years ago, I would start crying when he wouldn’t go in his cage and I had to force him. Naturally, his response to being handled more roughly was to bite, because put yourself in that position. You’d fight back too! So my crying was associated with those struggles.

He remembered that for years. Even though we’ve been great for the past couple years, as soon as I would start crying for some unrelated reason (usually writing something sad) his mood would change immediately. He thought, shit, here it comes, she’s gonna flip out on me and I haven’t even done anything wrong, I never did anything to deserve it before, she just does this! Because how could he possibly understand that I needed to go work on something all those times? And even if he could understand that, why would he think that justifies imprisoning him? Of course he wouldn’t. It isn’t fair. So of course his response to my crying was to get pre-emptively hostile; he wasn’t about to let me dick him around again.

The only reason I didn’t realize that for so many years was simply because it was so hard to get past how I thought about those things as a human. From my perspective, it had just been that I had to write and he was being too needy so I had to put him up. When he wouldn’t cooperate, I would focus on my frustration, on how irritating it was that I couldn’t even do a simple thing like write. But think about how good you feel when you’re needy and people shove you away, you know? It makes everything way worse.

After that realization, every time I cried around him I would stop and say, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, I’m not mad at you, you’re such a good bird, mommy’s okay,” and stroke his beak, even when he tried to bite my fingers because he was convinced I was going to start bossing him around. Only now can I cry around him without setting him off. I had to reassure him I’m not an unreasonable maniac who’s gonna start shit with him out of nowhere, because that’s exactly how he perceived me for so long. 

And he wasn’t wrong to perceive me that way. He was accurate, and I was too ignorant and self-absorbed to recognize how tyrannical my behavior had been. Humans don’t usually label their own behavior as tyrannical. Every tyrant thinks it’s their right.

That stuff sticks with social creatures. And parrots are smart. They don’t have a the same sort of cortex like humans, but instead they developed an area of their brain that serves much the same purpose. Any higher intelligence that evolves from a different branch of life is going to have a brain that doesn’t look like a mammalian brain, but that doesn’t mean it can’t do the same things. It means it had to evolve from a different set-up, just like there are tons of different evolutionary models for eyes, or various organs. Different hardware can run the same sorts of software, and sometimes different hardware runs VERY similar software. 

You can’t accept that parrots are cognitively advanced and separate that from its emotional applications. Yeah, my parrot can form new sentences that make sense and use them in context. My parrot sits around taking songs he knows, and making variations on them, and mashing them together where they sound similar. He works out spatial puzzles, and he figures out how to reach things he can’t. 

BUT THEY ARE SOCIAL. THEY HAVE EMOTIONS. THERE IS NO FALSE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN THOSE THINGS JUST BECAUSE HUMANS WOULD SURE FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE IF THERE WAS.

Parrots analyze you, they stew, they plot revenge if they’re angry. Back in the day, my parrot had some REALLY tricky ways of scoring a hit on me. For example, he would put on a nice demeanor, TOTALLY devoid of the usual parrot body language warning signs, ask for a kiss, then bite me. He would demurely put his head down to be preened, then bite me. He would drop a toy so I would pick it up, then he’d jump me while I was bending down, and bite me. And I was super sweet to my parrot 95% of the time, I even got frustrated less frequently than most people! Parrots, just like other intelligent social animals, sure as fuck use that intelligence for emotional reasons.

People underestimate parrots, not just cognitively but psychologically. As much as bird training books want to advise people to be more forceful, or use treats to train them to comply, that’s all cruel and manipulative and doesn’t foster a respectful relationship. They know they’re just doing something solely to avoid your anger, or to get food from you. They don’t mistake that for affection. They see that you can eat whatever you want and choose not to share things with them. They see that you make them jump through hoops the humans in the household don’t have to. They see that you (hopefully) don’t treat the other humans with the same impatience and hostility and forcefulness that’s directed at them. Those training methods only ever made my parrot worse. They’re not as stupid as we want to tell ourselves, and they won’t show empathy to someone who doesn’t have empathy for them, because why should they? At best, you can break their spirit. Many well-meaning decent people do not realize they have done this.

Which is one reason why so many parrots end up in rescues due to self-mutilation. Parrots literally kill themselves sometimes. Google it if you want to see horrifying pictures.

Seriously. You can’t get a parrot and expect it to behave the way mine does now. It almost certainly won’t. My parrot doesn’t behave this way because parrots are sweet and cool and want to love you, he behaves this way because I learned to be a less shitty human who respects that he has a rich inner life and does not exist to serve my happiness.

Parrots are very much not like other pets.  They resemble children in the level of care and attention they need.  I know, I know, everyone says their pets are “like their children” – but this isn’t an analogy of how much you love your pet, it’s about the actual cognitive and psychological structure of a parrot. 

If a parrot does not get the same level of intellectual and social stimulation needed by a human child (and no, parrots are not just human children with feathers, and adult parrots are adult parrots, but it’s still an important analogy to make because no other analogy comes close to describing the reality), the parrot will suffer horribly, develop intense psychiatric problems, and may begin to self-harm or even, in extreme cases, commit suicide by pecking out their own organs.  (Think about the level of torment it would take to get you to choose such a violent mode of death.) 

If you are not ready to take care of a human child, you are not ready to take care of a parrot, end of story.  They require the same kind and level of care, and planning for their future (because if taken care of properly, they will possibly outlive you).  Parrots (aside from budgies) are also wild animals, with everything that entails. 

Additionally, you have to learn a lot about their particular physiology, because otherwise you can inadvertently cause their deaths by doing something as simple as cooking with Teflon (this is why many people think birds “don’t last long”, because they’re so easy to kill in so many ways that people wouldn’t expect, that’s where the whole canary in the coal mine thing came from, they’re super-sensitive to bad things in the air because they’re designed to take as much oxygen out of the air as possible, for flight purposes, but that also means they take a lot of toxins out of the air too).

You have to stimulate them as much as you would a child, talk to them as much as you would a child, and try as hard as you can to learn the way they talk back as much as you would a child who had a communication disability that made understanding their speech extremely difficult (assuming you’re dealing with a species with at least a somewhat “squawky” voice – often the species with the clearest voices, like African Greys, are considered to have better language skills, even though all they have is clearer speech… there are other species like Quaker parrots, with just as good language skills, but you can barely understand a word they say because they have trouble duplicating certain human speech sounds). 

And yes, if you talk to your parrot normally, instead of getting in their face and saying “PRETTY BIRD POLLY WANNA CRACKER?” or training them to repeat things by using treats, then they will almost always pick up the meaning of your words, and will generally learn to use at least some words appropriately in conversation.  They will even recombine words when they don’t know the word for something, and use words in ways that reflect their understanding of the world.  For instance, I have a friend whose parrot once said in a very clear voice, “Mommy, come here, help me!”  And at first she didn’t understand.  But then she realized that “help me” meant “pick me up”.  My friend is in a wheelchair and when she needs help transferring she says “help me” and someone picks her up.  So the bird learned that “help me” means “pick me up”.

My friend talks to her parrot all the time, explaining everything about the human world that might be confusing to her.  This has helped the parrot deal with certain things, in a way that you couldn’t do with an animal that didn’t understand English.  For instance, the parrot was afraid of firecrackers during the fourth of July, and she explained, “It’s not a big deal, humans just like to blow things up during some of our holidays, nothing’s going to hurt you.”  And as soon as the parrot got the explanation, she calmed down.  That doesn’t always work for everything she’s afraid of, but it works more often than most people would believe.  I know cats who understand far more English than they’re given credit for (and some of them even try to repeat some English words), but even they don’t understand enough for that kind of thing to work for them.

Oh a cool fact about Quaker parrots that may be true of some other parrots:  They choose their own names.  In infancy, they experiment with a variety of sounds.  At a certain point, they choose a certain sound as their personal name-sound, and after they’ve made that choice, every other bird in the flock calls them that for the rest of their lives.  I think it’s really cool there’s a species that names themselves in infancy and that’s an actual thing.  I’m pretty sure that eventually it’ll be found that many parrots have language of their own.  If prairie dogs have been found to have a large vocabulary, then surely a group of birds  now increasingly known for being able to speak and understand and answer multiple novel questions in actual English have those abilities because they have languages of their own in the wild.  Maybe not languages as complex as human languages, but maybe as complex, we just don’t know yet.  I just can’t see them having the ability to learn English and other human languages, without them using that ability among themselves.

Don’t believe me about the language skills being real?  Watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzPiTwDE0bE

That’s a parrot who was chosen at random from a pet store, and who learned to answer multiple novel questions about the same groups of objects with a high level of accuracy (although he’d also eventually get bored and refuse to cooperate on purpose, giving wrong answers almost as a way of saying “fuck you I’m sick of this, let’s do something less boring” to the scientists, so they had to find ways of keeping his interest).  Which simply can’t be done if you have no ability to actually use and comprehend language on a high level.  Parrots don’t just “parrot” unless all you do is teach them to “parrot”.  There are some human beings with fewer language skills than most parrots have – that’s the level of actual skill overlap they have with our species, and it’s not just language, it’s also many other cognitive traits as well that they share with humans.  Also some of their social skills are often better than those of adult humans, which means, among many other things, they can end up figuring out how to get you to do whatever they want without you even realizing they’re doing it until later.

I get very angry when I hear people say my friend “spoils” her parrot because of the amount of toys she has on her cage.  If you leave your parrot in a mostly-bare cage all day, you’re doing the equivalent of locking a five-year-old child in a bare playpen by themselves all day long (and then wondering why they don’t act all friendly when you come home).  Providing the amount of stimulation they actually need in order to be emotionally healthy is not spoiling them, it’s doing the bare minimum they require in order to be happy!  She did once have a rather spoiled parrot (because she didn’t know at first how to take care of one, and made a lot of rookie mistakes), but this particular parrot is a rescue parrot who’s been to hell and back and almost didn’t survive, she’s tough as nails, and she’s anything but spoiled.  And my friend is now experienced enough to know when and how to say no to a bird, and when to give the bird what the bird wants and needs. 

So having a parrot is like having a human around, in terms of their needs.  It’s true that just about every animal needs more respect and stimulation than they’re generally given by humans, because humans are often kind of shitty towards animals.  But some animals need so much intellectual and social stimulation that it’s really on a different order than the average pet, and more like having a human around.  Not because they’re in any way human, but because they have some of the same needs at the same level that humans do, whereas other animals don’t always.  Like, all animals need to be loved, respected, and stimulated.  But you can have, say, a very psychologically healthy cat, in a situation where if you put a parrot (or a human) in the same situation they would develop severe emotional problems or even become suicidally depressed. 

And that’s what people mean when they say having a parrot is like having a child.  They’re not talking about attachment or love, they’re talking about the actual needs of the animal as compared to some other animals that are more tolerant of being given less intense social and intellectual stimulation from humans.  And most parrots in most places get a bad name as pets specifically because most parrots are grossly neglected by their humans and develop intense emotional problems as a result, and then humans assume that’s just their normal personalities.  So don’t get a parrot unless you want to put the amount of time and effort you’d put into a kid, it’s not fair to the parrot and many end up in parrot sanctuaries (if they’re lucky!) after people can’t deal with them anymore, often after years of severe neglect or even abuse.  (And, as one shelter owner put it on a video I saw “…and then the guilt sets in, and then they end up here.”) 

I once heard a description of a parrot sanctuary at night when the humans had turned off the lights and left the parrots to talk among themselves… and a lot of the parrots were saying horrible things that had clearly been said to them, and that they took completely to heart because they actually understood the fucking words, not just the tone behind them. 

I know people who think it’s funny to say awful things to dogs in a “loving” tone of voice because the dogs (sometimes, but not always! never underestimate them entirely, because sometimes some dogs do understand some words as actual words, that’s how sheepdogs learn dozens of commands after all) don’t understand the actual words being used.  I think that’s a fairly twisted and mean-spirited thing to do, even when people think they don’t mean anything by it, it just has this air of condescension to it that makes my stomach turn.  (Especially since I’ve had people do the same thing to me when they thought I couldn’t understand them.  And I’ve seen people do the same to other autistic people.  Not cool.  Ever.)

If you were to say awful things to a parrot in a “loving” tone of voice, and the parrot has had any normal exposure to the language you’re speaking since the parrot was little?  Then they probably understand exactly what you’re saying to them, and they will decide you’re a jackass, unless they decide you’re right.  Either way it can have tragic consequences, so just don’t?  Ever?  With any animal?  No matter how little you think they understand you?  Humans with presumed comprehension problems included in this?

FFS, just don’t, ever, underestimate the needs of a parrot.  It’s hard to say this without making it sound like other animals don’t have needs. And that’s not what I’m saying.  I’m saying that what parrots need is so intense that it’s on a completely different order than, say, what a cat needs.  A cat still needs more than most humans will ever give a cat.  But a cat can be healthy and happy in a situation that would destroy your average parrot, or human, or dolphin, or ape, or other animal that has an extremely active and complex mind of a certain very particular type that requires a very particular type of stimulation, combined with an equally intense and complex level of social needs.  Cats are far more complex intellectually and socially than they’re given credit for, and they need more than they are generally ever given, but they still don’t have the same needs from their humans as parrots do.  It’s a completely different ball game for a wide variety of reasons.  No matter what pet you get, they need more respect and stimulation than most humans will give them, but parrots need roughly no less than what humans need, and that’s a lot.

I also agree completely about people mistaking the relationship you have with an animal, for the animal themselves.  I wrote a post recently about how people are always telling me they “wish they had a cat like Fey”, when I know that if they took Fey home with them they would be probably more unsatisfied with her than they are with their cats.  (Because Fey expects, and therefore demands, a certain level of respect, and will not hesitate to lash out if you cross certain boundaries with her.  I know that these same people would call such a cat “mean”.)  What they really mean is that they wish they had the relationship with their cat that I have with Fey.  But they don’t know they mean that, so they blame the cat, instead of the way they relate to cats in general.  I wrote an entire post about this recently, you can read it here:  Fey is not an unusual cat.

That post is probably worth reading if you have that reaction about any type of animal, because the same pitfalls apply with regard to respecting any kind of animal. 

But I can see why the OP is extremely wary of people reading about their relationship with their parrot and saying “Oh I want a parrot then!”  Without having any idea what a parrot entails, and without having any idea that the reason this person has such an amazing parrot is not the parrot, but the fact that they have forged a relationship with a particular bird through intense respect and getting to know each other over time.  Wanting “a parrot” because you see someone who has a good relationship with their parrot is sort of like “wanting a cat like Fey” – it’s not going to happen unless you change how you relate to the person in question, whether that person is human, cat, bird, or some other animal.  You can’t have a good relationship with someone without respecting that person.(1)   And you can’t respect a parrot without at least making your best effort to provide that parrot with the level of stimulation a parrot needs, which is a whole whole whole lot more than most pets need.

(1) Although some people – both with humans and with animals, but especially with animals and with especially some types of humans (who aren’t for whatever reason, such as age-related or disability-related reasons, able to talk back or contradict them in any way) – manage to forge entirely fake and imaginary relationships with someone and then pretend the person’s protestations don’t even exist.  This is a horrible thing to do to anyone.  Don’t.   Ever.  This is not respect no matter how much you sugar-coat it to yourself and pretend it’s different than it is.  You can do more damage to a relationship this way than with some forms of outright abuse, depending on the situation. 

See Ashley X and the whole “pillow angel” thing for an extreme example of what can happen to a human this is done to with impunity because of a disability that prevents her talking back.  What her parents have done to her is not love, but they’re convinced it is, because they have an imaginary version of her in their heads and she can’t tell them it’s imaginary, at least not in any way they’re willing to listen to (she’s probably telling them all the time through subtle actions, such as eye movements, that they ignore or willfully misinterpret).  I pick that as an example because it has all the hallmarks of how some people (whose actions seriously disturb me but who aren’t doing anything legally considered abuse or neglect) treat their pets, but it’s being done to a human being because she can’t talk back or escape the situation.  It can also be done to humans who are too young, too scared, or too passive to talk back, in addition to humans who have disabilities that make talking back (or being listened to when we do) difficult.  And it can even be done to people who talk back very vociferously, as long as the person lives in enough of a fantasy world to totally ignore what the person they’re doing it to is saying, or to attribute it to everything but what it actually is.

All of this is often unintentional on the part of the person doing it, but it’s no less damaging for all that.  I know so many cats whose humans pick them up and make coochy-coo noises and blow into their stomachs and stuff like that, while the cat has learned to go limp and let their eyes glaze over, and the human mistakes this reaction for affection, and it turns my stomach every time I see that dynamic happening.  Sometimes the worst offenders are people who think they’re “good with cats” but are rather simply good at making cats submit to their wills for the duration of their interaction.  Which reminds me – if I tell you that Fey doesn’t like being touched on a particular body part (she has nerve damage) and you instantly try to touch that body part to prove that you’re a special person who can get away with touching it (and on a good day she’ll let you, it doesn’t make it right)?  I’ll just decide you’re a total asshole, I will not decide you’re a person with a ~special way with cats~.  Because I can actually read Fey’s body language, unlike you, and that means I know when she’s deliberately restraining herself from clawing your face off, because she actually does try to be at least somewhat polite to clueless hairless apes.  You’re meanwhile ignoring Fey’s body language because she’s telling you something you don’t want to hear, and that does not equal being “good with cats” in any way shape or form.

There was a wonderful episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic that explored the dark side of being “good with animals” when Fluttershy tries to force her companionship and “love” for animals on animals that don’t want it, with utterly horrifying results.  I loved that scene, not because I don’t like Fluttershy, but because it shows how even someone who seems meek and “good with animals” can get an ego about it and do horrible violating things in the name of “love” (she gets to the point where she starts setting traps for animals and then trying to befriend them right after she’s scared the shit out of them, and doesn’t seem to notice this isn’t love in any way shape or form).  Unfortunately the Youtube video has been taken down for copyright infringement, but it’s the gala episode, if you can find that anywhere.  It’s well worth watching, although it’s pretty horrifying and potentially triggering if you’ve ever seen it in action in real life.  It has the exact right sickeningly cloyingly nauseatingly sweet quality that the whole “pillow angel” mentality has, too.  (And no, I’m not saying animals can’t be cute or that people shouldn’t ever react to them as if they’re cute, but there’s an entire… mentality… that goes well beyond “cute” into “horrifying”.)