Opinion - News Analysis

Prodigy or bird brain?

— PHOTO: AFP

Alex the parrot.

America is in mourning. Alex, the African grey parrot which was smarter than the average American President, has died at the relatively tender age of 31. It could count to six, identify colours, understand concepts such as bigger and smaller, and had a vocabulary of 150 words. To its supporters it was proof that the phrase “bird brain” should be expunged from the dictionary.

Alex was the star of the Alex (Avian Learning Experiment) Foundation, run by Irene Pepperberg at Brandeis University in Boston. She bought it from a pet shop in 1977, and spent the past 30 years training it and analysing its progress. “Alex was my closest colleague,” a devastated Professor Pepperberg said at the weekend. “Alex broke all preconceived notions about bird brains. He had the intelligence of a five-year-old and the communication skills of a two-year-old, and sometimes threw tantrums like a small child would. He would take his beak and knock everything on the floor.”

The foundation posted a lachrymose farewell on its website: “Please bear with us as we move though this difficult time of grief and regain our composure. We have received thousands of emails and continue to go through them. The support you have shown us is overwhelming and we are forever grateful.”

This, though, is quite measured compared with the tribute posted by one fan: “Alex taught us many, many things about how the avian brain works. In doing so, he helped define the bonds between human animals and the rest of creation, illuminating a commonality that was unimagined before he showed us his truth. Alex opened the door into his mind — a mind that was so similar to ours that it seemed like coming home, and yet so different that it opened a thousand different doors to the universe.” An Internet condolence book has been started in Alex’s memory.

It seems that Alex’s early death — African grey parrots are usually expected to live for 50 years or more — has spurred an outpouring of emotion. “As a parrot owner myself, you hope that your bird outlives you,” says a poster on science website Slashdot. “And yet, in some ways, they’re just so delicate. You can’t take a nap next to your parrot because you might roll on to it. You have to keep their wings clipped, or they might fly into a ceiling fan, or a burner, or escape [which in most places is a death sentence due to hawks, inclement weather, etc].”

The amount of coverage generated in the U.S. by Alex’s death — compared, say, with the average natural disaster in the developing world — also reflects the fact that it had become something of a TV celebrity, with, as The New York Times noted, “his own brand of one-liners.”

As well as appearing on TV, Alex was the subject of numerous scientific papers in which Professor Pepperberg sought to prove that when it talked, it was not just mimicking what it heard, but understood what it was saying. “Dr. Pepperberg’s pioneering research resulted in Alex learning elements of English speech to identify 50 different objects, seven colours, five shapes, quantities up to and including six and a zero-like concept,” said the foundation in a statement announcing its passing. “He used phrases such as ‘I want X’ and ‘Wanna go Y,’ where X and Y were appropriate object and location labels. He acquired concepts of categories, bigger and smaller, same-different, and absence. Alex combined his labels to identify, request, refuse and categorise more than 100 different items, demonstrating a level and scope of cognitive abilities never expected in an avian species … Her research with Alex shattered the generally held notion that parrots are only capable of mindless vocal mimicry.”

But not all scientists accepted Professor Pepperberg’s pioneering findings. Some argue that the parrot was no more than a clever mimic who, adept at social conditioning, was picking up cues from its long-time trainer. Herbert Terrace, a psychology professor at Columbia University famous for his language experiments in the 1970s with a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky, is on record as saying that Alex was making a “rote response.” “In every situation, there is an external stimulus that guides his response … The words are responses, not language.” He accepted that the parrot was “a smart bird,” but said there was, at most, minimal thought involved when it made its responses.

Happily, Professor Pepperberg has two other African Greys, called Griffin and Arthur, left to continue her work. They are younger than Alex and at a less advanced stage in their cognitive development, but she is hopeful that with training they will scale the heights of their predecessor. The work of the Alex Foundation, which cites its mission as to “expand the base of knowledge establishing the cognitive and communicative abilities of parrots as intelligent beings … [and] improve the lives of parrots,” does not end with Alex.

Its death, as the debate it has prompted on blogs indicates, touches on a number of difficult subjects: the suspect Cartesian differentiation of the world into thinking humans and dumb animals; the argument over where mimicry ends and independent thought begins; the question of whether caging birds for experimentation is legitimate; the contention that teaching animals language is both demeaning and pointless — animals are animals, not ersatz humans; and the degree to which tender American sensibilities should be subjected to verbatim quotations from the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.

(Stephen Moss is a staff writer on The Guardian and should not be confused with the naturalist of the same name.)