Nancy J. Jacobs was president of the ASEH from spring 2023 through spring 2025. Germinate is publishing her Presidential Address, delivered at the 2025 ASEH conference in Pittsburgh, in three parts. This is part three.
Handfeeding is not domestication, which is intervening at the level of the species, through artificial selection. Some pet keepers think parrots, with their sociability and intelligence, are candidates for domestication. Selective breeding could make a significant difference in ten to fifteen generations. 1 But successful domestication would require a founder population with an extraordinary tolerance for humans. It also would require patient husbands.
I may have found this combination in January 2020, when I visited John Gonzáles, who was raising parrot chicks and human children in Brooklyn, New York (figure 11). John was not a bird person until he acquired parrots that other people no longer wanted. He kept them in an enclosure on the roof of his Manhattan apartment building. They helped him feel connected to nature in what he called “this city that is entirely created by people.”2
When I met John, he had three adult greys, two females—Peanut and Joey—and a male, Gonzo. Peanut was John’s close companion. She had been living in another household where she had had free range of the place. Those people re-homed her “because they couldn’t keep up with her.” Coming to John, she bonded with him. They do little routines, with Peanut dancing to John’s singing or pretending to fall dead when he “shoots” her with his fingers. Things were more difficult with Gonzo, who was aggressive, and with Joey, who was anxious around people.
Both Peanut and Gonzo flirted with John by regurgitating food, but for the first eight years he had them, they didn’t mate with each other. When the family moved to a new apartment, the birds had a lot of time out of their cages during the day but roosted at night in a closet. John started using a humidifier. He suspects that twelve hours of darkness in the closet and the higher humidity better approximated conditions in the birds’ native tropical forest. Peanut and Gonzo became mates. Was it that Peanut had the clout to expel Joey or that Gonzo chose the more confident female? Either way, the reproducers were the two birds who were better adapted to people. Joey was “sexiled,” as John’s wife Sara put it, to another room. Peanut and Gonzo started raising chicks in the closet. 3
When I visited in January 2020, they had a clutch just a few weeks old. John fed the chicks two or three times a day, even as Peanut and Gonzo also continued their feedings. I watched as John extended a stick into the nest, Peanut and Gonzo stepped on to the stick, and John moved them to a perch a few feet away. It would have been too provocative for him to put his hands near the nest if Gonzo was close (figure 12). From a distance, the pair watched on high alert but without interfering as he took the chicks.
Then, John, the chicks, and Peanut removed to the kitchen; Gonzo was not quite tame enough to stand by for feeding by a human. John fed the babies chicken eggs while Peanut watched nearby (figure 13). He hadn’t named the chicks, but he knew them as individuals. John was in high caregiving mode, feeding his toddler daughter, who sat nearby in a highchair, and sometimes offering a snack to Peanut, too. At the end he wiped all babies’ faces.
This is an asymmetrical partnership, but John and Sara think of the co-parenting as mutual; they say that Peanut and Gonzo also helped them raise their children: the older kids learned responsibility by caring for the birds, and when the baby cried, John used Peanut as a distraction.
John and Sara said were ambivalent about raising pets. Their birds all came to them through re-homing, and John was hesitant about becoming “part of that industry, part of the problem.” He has qualms about “playing god” with the responsibility and the “burden of choosing whether or not to let these creatures come into existence.” He would rather redirect people to take in rescue animals. But Peanut and Gonzo won them over. As they were having children, they felt bound to respect the parrots’ desire to reproduce. Sara said, “We’ve made the choice to support the parrots when they create life. They are happy in there together. It’s a good life for them to have, to raise a clutch.” John hopes that co-parented chicks will be prepared to live with people, that they will be friendly, but not “over bond” with humans, that they will have a healthy understanding that they are birds and be less prone to problematic behavior.
John and Sara are selective about whom they sell to. They keep up relationships with the new owners and report that the chicks get “tons of attention.” John knows he can’t control what happens to the birds over their decades-long lives. He says, “Every life has suffering. How much of that can you eliminate and alleviate? It’s not quite that godlike.” John reflected, “It was a choice to let them have a life, but it feels like I brought a little more love and happiness into the world.” Peanut and Gonzo raised eight clutches of chicks before they stopped reproducing during the COVID pandemic.
John is an artist, and his interest in multi-species connection comes through in his paintings and drawings. He makes graceful images of lonesome, vulnerable human nudes with bird heads (figures 14-18; John’s sketches and drawings are accessible at https://www.john-gonzalez.com/). John describes his subjects as “gods in a state of decline with no believers anymore. A god creature who is sad about the state of the world.” To me, they also look like creatures who may have had both people and birds as parents. To me, they show a possible world that is beautiful despite the melancholy.
People may disagree with John’s choice to raise chicks. I understand the criticism, but I’m more interested in what John, Peanut, and Gonzo can tell us about past and future interspecies relations. As I watched John the parrot whisperer, and Peanut, the friend to humans, collaborate to care for the chicks, I felt I had a sense of how domestication began millennia ago.
Does John and Peanut’s success tell us anything about the possibility of domestication? If this partnership is exceptional only because of John’s ability to train Peanut, no selective breeding is taking place. But if Peanut has some exceptional tolerance for humans within her, the experiment in their Brooklyn apartment might say something about a potential future. When I asked him if his birds might be exceptional, he demurred: “I guess you’d know if you had 100 birds, but I’ve just got the two.” Domestication is my question, not John’s aspiration.
Watching him feed those chicks, I also wondered what artisanal aviculture could mean for the future of caged birds. It’s unlikely that artisanal production could become an alternative to extinction. The first problem is logistical. Domestication requires many generations, a large gene pool, and a lot of laborers. There is little likelihood that a critical mass of people will dedicate themselves to taking care of parrots the way John has.
The second problem is ethical. Partisans of animal rights object to the prospect of inflicting domestication on another species. I have seen these birds in the wild and I understand that argument. But since whatever future parrots have will involve captivity, it could be a kindness to offer them the benefit of classic husbandry as an alternative to handfeeding. Husbandry is a double-edged forging of both domination and care, but all the same, some domesticated animals lead happy-ish lives. Human care for the entire species would be preferable to a cruel and harmful discipline of vulnerable chicks taken from their parents to be raised by people. A slow, gentle effort of propagating parrots who adapt to us could provide an alternative to both extinction and its opposite. Maybe for an animal like Peanut, who likes humans, a happy-ish life with us is better than no life at all. Maybe it’s also in the interest of the species to survive. If grey parrots can survive the Great Acceleration with less damage to themselves, it certainly could bring happiness to humans, but many people who know greys would not want them to exist for our sake. 4
These are the lessons of the Anthropocene, seen through the history of grey parrots. We see extraordinary human power, but also intimacy between people and others. We see that the interests of capital have reorganized the existence of this species. Even so, people respond by expressing care, educating others, and working to improve the existence of individual birds. It is an uncertain moment of great divergence. Despite my interest in John’s experience, I doubt that he and Peanut will be a model for future human-parrot relations.
These are the lessons of the Anthropocene, seen through the history of grey parrots. We see extraordinary human power, but also intimacy between people and others. We see that the interests of capital have reorganized the existence of this species. Even so, people respond by expressing care, educating others, and working to improve the existence of individual birds. It is an uncertain moment of great divergence.
My best hope is that this story about the care of husbandry and the cost of parenting may inspire people to think about the more and less harmful futures for parrots. If we want creatures that don’t hate living with us, we must invest in them. If we’re not willing to do that, if we continue to hire poorly remunerated human laborers to parent, one by one, creatures who aren’t afraid of us but who don’t know they are birds, then for grey parrots, extinction may be a more desirable fate than its opposite.
Read parts one and two in previous issues
- Doane and Qualkinbush, My Parrot, My Friend: An Owner’s Guide to Parrot Behavior, 97.[↩]
- Interviews with John González and Sara Nolan, 5-7 January 2020. John’s wife Sara, a poet and essayist, has written about raising chicks: Sara Nolan, “What the Parrots Taught Me,” The New York Times, 2 August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/well/family/what-the-parrots-taught-me.html.[↩]
- Nolan, “What the Parrots Taught Me.”[↩]
- A case for domesticating parrots: Tom Marshall, Why Parrots? Why Aviculture? (Avian Publications, 2021). My thinking on the ethics of domestication and the rights of domesticated and wild animals is informed by an interview with Phoebe Linden, October 2023 and by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011).[↩]
