Professor Irene Pepperberg (pictured below) is the awardee of the Comparative Cognition Society‘s Annual Research Award for 2020 for her body of work. With that, it is a Special Issue in Learning & Behavior in honor of her research contributions. In the interview, she reflects on her career, gives her 20-year self some advice, talks about research with African Grey Parrot (Alex), her new Greys (Griffin and Athena), gets a brief visit from a generous neighbor, and discusses the evolving gender discrimination in our field, and more!

Transcription

Intro

Rivers: You’re listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast.

Now, here is your host, Laura Mickes.

Intro to the interview with Professor Irene Pepperberg

Mickes: Professor Irene Pepperberg’s groundbreaking research has had and continues to have great impact on the field of comparative cognition. Her research has transformed our understanding of cognition by studying the cognitive abilities of birds. Irene is the recipient of the Comparative Cognition Society‘s Annual Research Award for 2020 for her body of work. And the Psychonomic Society journal Learning & Behavior has a Special Issue in honor of her work. And that’s why I have the pleasure of interviewing her.

I hope you enjoy my interview with Professor Irene Pepperberg.

Interview with Professor Irene Pepperberg

Mickes: Hi Irene, it’s such a pleasure to meet you and ask you questions about your research and your career. So thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed.

Pepperberg: Oh, thank you for having me.

Mickes: In preparation for this interview with you, I watched many videos of you talking about your research and the stories that you tell about your work with Alex. Um, it sounds like you two really could have had a very successful comedy act, but lucky for us, you stuck with research.

Mickes: For the people who are unaware, who is Alex?

Pepperberg: Alex is an African grey parrot that I purchased from a pet store in 1977. He was one of nine birds in a cage, walked into the store. I said I wanted to buy a parrot. The fellow says which one I said, “I don’t care, you pick it” because I wanted to make sure that there was absolutely no possible bias in the selection. So he grabs a butterfly net scoops up a bird, flips him on his back, clips his toes, clips his wings, clips his beak, throws him in a box, and says, “here – $600.”

Mickes: What?!

Pepperberg: And that was our introduction to poor Alex.

Mickes: Poor or extremely fortunate Alex? Cause I think he had one heck of a life.

Pepperberg: He did, but at that moment, I’m sure he didn’t think so. [laughs]

Mickes: You researched Alex for how long?

Pepperberg: 30 years.

Mickes: 30 years, and some of your past interviews, you reflected on how challenging it was, especially in the early days to get fellow scientists and funders to take your proposals and your research seriously, that’s changed because of your efforts.

So in a very real way, you paved the way for the people who wrote the papers that are in the Special Issue in honor of you and your research, your contributions. I only have access to the titles of the papers in the Special Issue.

You’ve inspired work testing on a whole host of bird species. There are tests on domestic chicks, on cockatoos, on hummingbirds, on species whose names I can’t pronounce [laughs]. Um, but you chose to study Alex who is an African gray parrot. Why? I mean, is that because that was in the pet store at that time?

Pepperberg: Oh, there were, there were specific reasons for choosing a gray.

First of all, although there wasn’t a whole lot of research on birds at the time, particularly parents, the papers that I had read said these birds were the clearest speakers so that the chances of this bird being able to talk clearly and other people understanding him were the greatest.

Second, there was some interesting research, particularly work by Otto Köhler in Germany who had studied numerical competence in grey parrots had beautiful papers on this that I had to have translated for me because my German is quite minimal.

And it was striking how intelligent they were given the studies he had been doing.

There were also a few studies in Russia on object detour problems. So I had at least some basis for making claims that these were intelligent species that could talk clearly. And that there was the possibility of doing this work.

There was also a researcher in Köhler’s lab. Dietmar Todt, who had just begun to try to teach these birds to communicate with humans. And he had developed this technique called the Model Rival, or MR, training paradigm. And he had gotten some limited results on this. So again, I could present something as building on all this previous work and not something that was completely de novo.

Mickes: But they still treated it as if it wasn’t worthwhile?

Pepperberg: At that point, the term avian cognition was an oxymoron.

Mickes: Avian … Birdbrain?

Pepperberg: Yeah. My first grant proposal came back, literally asking me what I was smoking.

Mickes: [laughs].

Pepperberg: And it was about I’m guessing maybe 20 years later I was giving a talk at a conference and one gentleman raises his hand at the end of the talk. And he says, well, this isn’t really a question. This is a comment. I said yes. And he said, well, I was the one who wrote that comment about what you were smoking. And I really do feel I have to retract it.

You know, we went out for a drink afterwards and we became friends. And whenever I was, you know, in, in that area where he was doing his research, we’d go out with him and his colleagues for dinner. So it became quite fun.

Mickes: So clearly you forgave him.

Pepperberg: Oh yes.

Mickes: I love how he admitted it. And he remembered.

Pepperberg: Yes, exactly.

Mickes: You finally did get funding. And then did you start working right away with Alex? Did you work with him without funding? I mean, you had, you had the bird, where did you get the $600 from?

Pepperberg: We started without any real funding. I was married at the time, so I didn’t have to worry about no food and shelter. Okay. My then-husband was willing to carry me for a while and he was a new assistant professor. So, you know, we had a reasonable amount of basics.

And I found students who were willing to either volunteer or work under work-study, so it didn’t cost much to cover them. And we were able to, you know, start the project and get some preliminary data. So the first few proposals were rejected, but again, it, it didn’t cost that much to start things. And as I said, I had some volunteers, and then our first grant was funded for just a year, which essentially meant that by the time you get the funding and start the research, you have like three months before you have to put in the next renewal and that renewal funded, which was really exciting.

But then we had a change in presidents and this was 1980. And essentially the idea was that basic research was no longer given a priority, particularly basic research that people thought was on the edge anyway. And I lost the grant. It was really hard.

That was also right about the same time that the clever Hans conference came up, which was a nightmare for everybody in the field of animal human communication because it didn’t appreciate how amazingly difficult it was to design studies and to figure out how to do studies.

This was a brand new field. So it was being criticized on all angles, some of them fairly, but it shouldn’t have been a way of ending the field. It should have been a way of strengthening the field. Constructive criticism is always important, but we were basing what we knew at the beginning on what was being done in child language.

That was the time when people were first beginning to learn how children learned their communication systems. Before that, there was very little experimental work on, on how children were learning. They were diary studies. So people would go into a family’s home. And over the course of every week, you know, write down everything that the child, that everything the parents had to the child. And that was considered how you did the research.

So when people were doing similar things with their non-human subjects, all of a sudden it was being criticized as being not rigorous, not careful. And it wasn’t really fair. We definitely needed to do more basic experiments and the people in child language realized that too cause they started doing basic experiments as well. Right. But it was, it was a process.

With everything going on, I lost my funding. At that point, one of my colleagues who was the closest thing to a mentor I had, Don Griffin, got me a tiny little grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

And literally given that I was working off of birdseed, you know, it means able to, to kind of muddle through until people began to realize that there was enough data to publish papers, that we were actually doing some really good science and the funding, you know, then came through. And then I was basically funded for, for a number of years with a few, a few hiccups along the way.

Mickes: Yeah.

Pepperberg: It didn’t become quite as, as nerve-wracking as it had been those few first few years.

Mickes: Was it hard to get your papers published then too? So it’s not just about funding. I can imagine that it’d be really hard to get people to accept papers. And where would you submit those to…?

Pepperberg: The first paper was rejected so many times it was really discouraging. And finally, I decided to submit it to the same journal that had published Dietmar Todt’s papers. Figuring, okay, they already published a paper on grey parrot vocal learning. And that was a very good move from the sense of getting it published because this was the Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, which was one of the best ethological journals in the world. Of course, my colleagues in the States looked at it and said, ‘Oh, she’s publishing in some bizarre obscure German journal,’ not realizing how actually difficult it was to get published in that journal.

Pepperberg: I remember when I tried to publish my second paper and one of the criticisms was how dare she named her subject?

Mickes: Oh.

Pepperberg: It should have been Bird #1 or something of that nature. And I just went, it’s a, he he’s been sexed. We know that it’s a he and his name is Alex. And, and of course now if you read all these papers, all the subjects are all named. They’re given names from, you know, people’s favorite television series or books series or whatever.

Did you name Alex? Where did that name come from?

Pepperberg: Yes. Avian Learning EXperiment.

Mickes: Oh, I had no idea.

Mickes: You’re a trailblazer and a case yourself in persistence. How did you not just say screw it, I’m not doing this. Why is it worth it?

Pepperberg: I joke with my students that, you know, the trailblazer is the mouse that gets his head chopped off. And the second one is the one that gets all the cheese,

Mickes: [laughs]

Pepperberg: but it just seemed to me that this was so important. We were getting beautiful data. Alex was working, the projects were going more slowly than I had hoped, but they were going in the direction I had hoped. He was succeeding on all the tasks I was presenting to him.

Mickes: Sometimes he surprised you with what he learned?

Pepperberg: Well, sometimes what he did was he would jump ahead of us and make it clear that he knew where we were heading on these projects. That was again, only much later in his life, but it was just fascinating.

One of the things that that fascinates me now is in 1987, we published a paper on the concept of same and different. And it was based on work that David Premack had published with his chimpanzee, Sarah. And he was extremely clear about why concepts of same and different were so important. They were not simply identity versus non-identity, which is what most of my colleagues were studying.

It was the idea that you could take two objects and understand that certain attributes could be the same where certain other attributes could be different. And yet there was still levels of sameness and difference.

And it was only this year, okay, 2020, 2021 that a Special Issue of Current Opinions [in Behavioral Sciences] came out discussing that difference between identity versus non identity and same different, and the idea that many animals understand same, but truly don’t understand different. They just look at it as not the same. It’s taken all those years for people to realize the kinds of issues that some of us were trying to bring to the fore.

Mickes: In the first same different experiment with Alex, did you think he would be able to tell differences between objects?

Pepperberg: Yes. Because if you look at their behavior in the wild, they have to be able to look at the fruits and things that they’re eating and say, Oh, this is the same berry that I had last week, but the color is different, so it must not be ripe yet. It’s the same shape. It’s the same scent. It’s the same size, it’s the same berry, but gee, this one is green. Last week it was red and it tasted good. So I have to wait.

Mickes: Huh. And he did do it? He was good at it?

Pepperberg: [nods].

Mickes: Yes.

Mickes: Do you know, Alex has a Wikipedia page?

Pepperberg: Oh yeah.

Mickes: [laughs] Of course you know.

Pepperberg: Well, he did have his obituary in The Economist and in The New York Times and in Time and in probably almost every other paper in the world.

Mickes: For just being plucked out of the group of them and being handed to Irene Pepperberg. Yeah. I imagine had a pretty good time of it. Well-fed, entertained…

Pepperberg: He, he was the kind of individual who enjoyed solving problems. And that was very lucky for me because right now I’m working with the parrot, Griffin, who is extremely smart. In some ways, he’s much smarter than Alex, but he doesn’t like to solve problems.

Mickes: Oh.

Pepperberg: So what he likes is – you give him a task and you kind of show him what you want. And then he does it in excellent order. All right.

Mickes: [inaudible; no idea whatsoever what I said].

Pepperberg: But he doesn’t like to solve the problem itself.

Mickes: Hmm

Pepperberg: So we can test them on important concepts, and he does very well, but he doesn’t jump ahead of us the way Alex would. And see what we’re going and say, oh, I know we’re going to do this and we’re going to solve that. And there we are.

Mickes: Is it a lack of motivation?

Pepperberg: I don’t know. I mean, he, he, you know, he grew up with Alex literally taking him to task unless he was perfect.

Mickes: Oh.

Pepperberg: So when he was learning his colors and we’d say, you know, Griffin, what color? And he’d say green, because that’s how they start vocalizing. And Alex would sit there and go ‘”GREEN.” Say better! Talk clearly!’ Alex would literally tell him, “say better, talk clearly, ‘GREEN.'” And Griffin was like, okay, okay. You know, just, …

Mickes: [laughs]

Pepperberg: Or we’d say, you know, we say, you know, ‘Griffin, what color?’ And Alex would on the next case would say, ‘no, tell me what shape!’ And Griffin would sit there looking and shrug his little birdy shoulders. And look at me, look at Alex and go, well, who should I answer? You know.

Mickes: Alex became a researcher!

Pepperberg: Yes, yes. He definitely wanted to be in charge.

Mickes: This is great. I wish I met him.

You’re still working with the African grey parrots. Had you worked with other species or that’s it that’s, that’s what you’re gonna learn about?

Pepperberg: Basically worked with greys. We have one small project where we looked at object permanence with an, I did this with one of my students who looked at object permanence and several other avian species for comparison.

But essentially I work with greys. And part of that is a stupid reason, which is if you work at a university, you have to have separate space for separate species and space at universities is always an issue.

Mickes: Gold

Pepperberg: The second issue was not silly. It’s because you start to learn about your subjects very, very well. And you learn in ways that are sometimes almost hard to explain. So a student will be working with the birds and I’ll say stop that, you’re going to get bitten. And they look at me like, huh. And they say, why? And I have to stop and think, and cause I’m seeing the bird’s behavior and it clicks and I’m going like, okay, look at the eyes. The eyes are getting slitty. The body posture is like this, you start learning.

And the worst bite I ever had was from an Amazon parrot because I did not understand Amazon parrot body behavior. And I didn’t recognize that I was being threatened. And so, it’s not the bird’s fault. The bird felt threatened and it just did what it does when it gets threatened.

But with my greys, I understand exactly where we’re headed. And I know when I, what I have to do to diffuse the issue or to, if necessary, to establish dominance, not that I never get bitten by my guys, but it’s very rare. And it’s usually in situations where they are literally, you know, grabbing onto me because they’re falling and they’re treating my hand like a branch and it’s just, I’m going to fall. You know, I can’t get my wings out in time. I’m just grabbing onto your hand. And …

Mickes: So you have then a lab at Harvard?

Pepperberg: Well, I did. Okay. Thanks to COVID, I no longer have a lab at Havard, but we did until March, so yes.

Mickes: Oh, sorry. Where…

Pepperberg: We’re now in a third-floor bedroom at the home of one of my research associates.

Mickes: That’s where the birds are?

Pepperberg: Yes.

Mickes: How many?

Pepperberg: Two.

Mickes: Do they get along?

Pepperberg: Griffin tolerates Athena.

Mickes: [laughs].

Pepperberg: She constantly nudges him. They’re in separate cages, but I have to watch her. She likes to climb down her cage and she threatens to go over to try to climb up his cage. So I have to keep, keep an eye on her.

She’s much younger and some of it’s being, you know, juvenile. I mean, she’s, she’s actually sexually mature. She’s an adult, but she’s still a young adult and he’s 25 years old. She’s only seven. So there’s that big, big gap.

Mickes: And you’re still doing research?

Pepperberg: Yeah, we’re still doing some research, not nearly as much because we can only have one person in with them at a time. That means we can’t do any modeling, which is the main source of training for the birds. So we’re getting some data on some projects that we can work one person at a time. It’s challenging.

Mickes: With these two greys, what are you interested in these days? Cause you’ve studied all types of cognition.

Pepperberg: Right. One study we’re doing is on delayed gratification. Um, the marshmallow study.

Mickes: Oh cool.

Pepperberg: We did a study with Griffin and he would wait for up to 15 minutes for a better treat. A lot of parrots and others and Corvidaes will wait for a better treat. None will wait any real length of time for more treats. So we’ve just started the work on the more treats. It seems to be going well.

We’re definitely working with Athena to get her, to learn her vocalizations, which again is hard because now Griffin has to be the model because that’s the only, there’s only one person in the lab at a time. So that again depends on whether he’s willing to tolerate her.

One of my former students, she’s now got her PhD and she’s coming in to do some work on some optical illusions with them using a touch screen.

Mickes: Oh.

Pepperberg: We’re really excited about that.

Mickes: That’s neat.

Pepperberg: She can do that by herself and you know, videotaping and watching them on the touch screens. So,

Mickes: Oh, perfect. And they must like it.

Pepperberg: The issue is interesting. So, um, we have to be very careful with the number of trials they get and how to work it because, Athena in particular has an attitude of going like, well, some days I don’t have to work at all, I just bang the screen randomly and I get a couple of nuts and that’s fine. And who cares?

So again, we have to set it up so that we are making sure that they’re willing to work that day and interested in working rather than just, you know, here, you got to sit and do it because if they’re sitting there and they’re preening and they’re walking and they’re not paying attention to the screen, we know that, you know, whereas if they’re looking at the screen intensely, like, okay, let’s get going.

Mickes: They’re game.

Pepperberg: Yeah.

Mickes: This passes ethics?

Pepperberg: They’re pet birds, they’re companion animals. I mean, it’s not the best of all situations, but with COVID we had no choice.

Mickes: Yea.

Pepperberg: In our protocol, they were supposed to come home with my senior lab manager. And of course, that’s set up for emergencies like, okay, there’s a potential flood in the lab and they’re going to be there for, you know, 24 hours. Okay. Not as it turns out almost a year. So we really had to scramble to find a situation.

Pepperberg: And thankfully, this, this wonderful RA in my lab had space for us. So she has birds of her own. She and her husband had built a huge aviary in the center of their home for her birds.

Pepperberg: Really?

Pepperberg: Yes, it’s gorgeous. It is the most exquisite situation for a captive parrot that I’ve ever seen in my life. So I was very much reassured that my birds were going to be cared for. And we have a small bubble of people, four to five people that we’re all extremely careful of our lives and who we contact outside of working and such so that we can be safe and continue to work.

Mickes: I want to see pictures of this house of hers. Is that possible? [laughs]

Pepperberg: That’s up to her. [laughs]

Mickes: If you were to go back, and this is a silly question, but if you were to go back and tell Irene who just graduated from college, do this, don’t do that. What kind of advice would you give yourself?

Pepperberg: Well, the one advice, which is something that my father had told me actually, but I didn’t pay attention to is that I do not suffer fools gladly. And I need to be much more tolerant and I would have told her to be much more tolerant.

Mickes: Yeah. Could she have been?

Pepperberg: I don’t know. No. I still find it hard to suffer fools.

Mickes: I appreciate you taking my stupid questions then.

Pepperberg: [laughs] That’s a different type of fool.

Mickes: [laughs] Thank you.

Pepperberg: Your questions are not foolish really. And truly there is no such thing as a foolish question. When I say about suffering fools, I’m talking about people who do not take correct care in experimental design, who over-interpret data, who make serious scientific errors and do not want to admit to them. And I’m very intolerant there and that has not served me well. There are probably better ways that I could have dealt with these transgressions.

Mickes: I’ve just been primed, but you think you ruffled some feathers that hurt your career along the way?

Pepperberg: Well, that’s an interesting metaphor, but yes, I’ve definitely ruffled a bunch of feathers.

Mickes: Do you think that being a woman was in any way…

Pepperberg: Oh, that was, that was made it much harder being a woman at the time made it much harder. I mean, we’re talking my starting in the seventies. There were so many instances where I would be the only woman in the room.

Mickes: Yeah. And they expected you to take notes?

Pepperberg: Well, not so much, but the issue was being talked over at faculty meetings, I would come up say something and it would be ignored. And five minutes later, some guy would say the same thing and it would be considered a brilliant comment on what’s going on or a brilliant idea that should be taken into account things like that.

Pepperberg: Going to conferences, and. I never had to deal with the kind of ugliness that women have been described. And me too.

Mickes: Yeah.

Pepperberg: There was certainly tons of innuendo. There were certainly instances where my ideas were just dismissed simply because they came out of a mouth of a female. Yes. It was, you know, that was a big, big issue. And if you look at, you know, most of the people in the field in that, at that time, I mean, there were incredibly few of us. Incredibly few of us.

Mickes: I fear we still have a long way to go, because, what you’re saying, I experience all the time.

Pepperberg: Well, nowadays it’s more implicit bias rather than overt bias. Um, at least as I’ve experienced it. And there are things that people do that they think help, but don’t.

So there was one example which I will give, and I will say this was at the University of Arizona when I was there. And they finally set up a program so that women could take maternal leave after having a baby. It was really important. Okay. This was good so that you didn’t have to somehow plan to have your baby in June, you know, so you could have the summer off, which was great. The problem was, they did not set up funds to provide for somebody to cover the teaching load. So either the course was not taught, which her students or somebody else had to teach an overload, which makes it all sorts of resentment against women. Even the women sitting on hiring committees.

[Ding! Dong! the doorbell rings]

Pepperberg: Somebody’s at my door.

Speaker 3: Of course.

[Several minutes later]

Pepperberg: [footsteps] It was my neighbor. [Holds up a bottle of champagne in front of the camera]

Mickes: How sweet! What did you do to deserve that?

Pepperberg: He can’t drink, but he is a buyer. And so he has me actually test out various wines.

Mickes: What?!

Pepperberg: Yes. To see if they’re drinkable and whether people like them or not. It’s a very good gig.

Pepperberg: [back to business] So even women sitting on the hiring committees are thinking in the back of their minds, well, if I hire this woman at some point, I’m probably going to have to cover her course. Where if I hire this guy, you know, he’ll take off a week when he has a new baby and you know, big deal. It won’t make, you know, somebody can, you know, his graduate student can cover that week’s worth of lectures. All right.

Mickes: Hmm.

Pepperberg: So those are the kinds of implicit biases implicit or not so implicit, but the point is that people aren’t always thinking through what they’re trying to do and how they’re trying to help women in science.

Pepperberg: And COVID – my female friends who have small children and they are just going completely crazy. You know, they are being hit much harder. You know, they all have spouses that are helpful. It still somehow lands more on them.

Pepperberg: Yeah. I mean, it’s, we, we do have a long way to go and that doesn’t even start getting at the issue of minorities and, you know, and minority women and, and all those kinds of things. We have, we have such a long way to go in our field.

Pepperberg: We have conferences. Now we’re asked to have some kind of diversity in the people we asked to give talks. And thankfully, it’s not that difficult in my field now to get a balance between men and women.

Mickes: Yeah.

Pepperberg: It’s very difficult to get minorities because they are still incredibly underrepresented.

Pepperberg: Right. Yeah, the list of authors who contributed to your Special Issue, at least the submitting author names, it looks half and half women men.

Pepperberg: Yeah. And there’s a lot of international contributions. I mean, right now funding for the kinds of animal cognition is much better in Europe than it is in the States.

Mickes: Is that right?

Pepperberg: Oh yeah.

Mickes: Oh yeah, that’s a question I want to ask you. My area of research is human memory. What would you tell those of us who only use human participants? Should we branch out?

Pepperberg: I wouldn’t suggest that you necessarily work with non-humans if you never had, I would suggest you collaborate with those of us who are working with non-humans.

The collaboration that I’ve had over the last several years with Susan Carey, who studies child development has been one of the most exciting ones in my career because we’re literally comparing the parrots to these young children using the same experiments.

Mickes: True comparative psychology!

Pepperberg: Yes. True comparative psychology. And it’s been really exciting.

Mickes: We need to find our pairs, our research pairs.

Pepperberg: And the reason for that is because you get to look at brains, not looking at them necessarily, you know, MRI looking at them, but looking at the way brains work that are organized totally different from human brains. There is some kind of convergent evolution clearly going on that allows these brains to function the same way as human brains in lots of ways.

But we need to find out the ways that they do function similarly and function differently. And are there aspects that are truly unique to humans or not? Is it a matter of how far a non-human can develop towards human abilities? Is there a limit? Or are we just limited by the way we’ve designed our experiments?

Mickes: Yes.

Pepperberg: In terms of human memory, our most recent paper with Griffin, he beat out Harvard undergraduate in several tasks, not all the tasks.

Mickes: [laughs]

Pepperberg: The most complicated, most difficult tasks, the Harvard undergraduate beat him. But on all the others, he was right up there and sometimes beat them.

Mickes: Wow.

Pepperberg: It was a sort of shell game, but there were four, four colored pom-poms hidden under four cups, four black cups. And then you move them a number of different swaps. And then only then did you say, you know, go find the green one, the green pompom.

So you had to keep track of all four colors. As they moved around four times, we started with two objects and two swaps and worked on way up and Griffin completely beat out the 6-8-year-old children. The 6-8-year-old children couldn’t even go do, we couldn’t even do the four cup, four swaps with them. They stopped at three cups and four swaps. Okay. Okay. So when he got up to four cups, three swaps and he was a little bit below the Harvard students and then the four cups four swaps, he dropped. But until that, in some cases, he beat out the Harvard undergraduates when you will look at the fewer numbers of cups and the fewer numbers of swaps or the fewer numbers of cups and large numbers of swaps, he was beating out.

Mickes: Now, why do you suppose that difference is there?

Pepperberg: Probably something to do with their ecology. I mean, think about the fact that they have, you know, they can have up to four chicks in a nest and the chicks are bouncing around and they have to remember which chick they’ve fed. Okay. So one chick doesn’t get all the food and the others starve to death. So I think there’s something, something in their ecology that, that helps them to do those types of tasks.

Mickes: I think I’ve taken up enough of your afternoon. It’s been such a pleasure, Irene, thank you so much.

Pepperberg: Oh, you’re welcome.

Mickes: Is there anything you want to add?

Pepperberg: Just a little bit in the sense that a lot of what we do likely has effect in terms of conserving the non-humans. And that people are more likely to conserve creatures whose abilities are more similar to their own, they sense of oneness and kinship. And so when we demonstrate to the public at large, the incredible abilities of these non-humans, we are also sensitizing them to the idea that the, their habitats and their lives are deserving of protection. And that’s something that that’s important. I mean, grey parrots are societies 1 endangered these days.

Mickes: They are?

Pepperberg: It’s the highest level of endangerment. Yes.

Mickes: Oh no. What can we do? Is there a foundation or a society?

Pepperberg: There’s all sorts of projects across the world, better trying to do something. But the issue is, if you want to buy a parrot as a pet, make sure it’s domestically bred, try not to get a parrot that’s been poached from the wild, you know, seriously think about the ethics of keeping these birds as, as pets anyway. I mean, in the wild, they forage 60 kilometers a day. I mean, even in the best of situations, you know, they’re flying, you know, within 12, by 12, by, you know, 30-foot aviaries, alright? [Visit The Alex Foundation to find ways to help.]

They mate, for life, many of these birds are kept in solitary, essentially. Their humans are their flocks and they interact with their humans and they seem to be adjusted and functional. But it’s these kinds of things that we really have to, to think about in terms of, of how we want to see the world and all of our places in it, and the idea of not separating ourselves completely. And that’s why, although there probably are things for which humans are unique, we are still all part of this planet.

Mickes: That’s a beautiful thing to end on. Thank you again so much, Irene.

Pepperberg: You’re welcome.

Concluding statement

Rivers: Thank you for listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast. If you liked this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel using your favorite podcast player or app.

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