We Have Never Been Husbands to Parrots (Domination without Domestication in the Grey Anthropocene Part 2)

Co-evolution has complemented love and training in allowing strangers of different species to become friends. In her 2003 book The Companion Species Manifesto, Donna Haraway described her relationship with her dog as an “embodied cross-species sociality” that mutually elevated them from “other” to “significant other.”¹

Most companion species connected with people through the culture of husbandry. When offered to subordinate humans and animals, husbandry is a double-edged thing. Ten thousand years ago, when humans began molding livestock from wild species, they arrogated to themselves both the right of domination and the responsibility of care. Care in Afro-eur-asian husbandry began for human benefit: people wanted to take advantage of the metabolism, cognition, and affect of some animals.Caring for a species also involved selecting for character traits. People chose the most docile cattle and the most pliable fowl and propagated offspring from those individuals.² Humans created dairy cattle and laying chickens by allowing the most lactatious of Bos taurus to breed and by not eating all the eggs of the most productive jungle hens (Gallus sp.).

Grey parrots became our companions only in the modern era, not in the Neolithic. In contrast to dogs, farm animals, and possibly cats, humans have not cultivated character by breeding pet parrots. We have practiced some selection for color, but there has been no effort to increase amiability towards humans or tolerance for life in a cage.³ Parrot experts Bonnie Doane and Thomas Qualkinbush put it well: “Whether wild-caught and imported or domestically bred and hand reared, parrots today are at best only three or four generations away from 35 to 38 million years of wild inheritance.” ⁴ The sad irony for parrots is that they selected themselves, for their own reasons, to develop the vocal abilities that inspire humans to put them in cages. 

The best theory about why parrots mimic is to form practical social connections. Scientists have suggested that each parrot has a contact call that serves as their individual aural label; their “names,” for lack of a better word. When they come together, they utter their own calls and repeat those of others. Hollering out their own label and repeating those of others, they improvise duets that lead to a merger of calls. The vocal interchange of their own sounds and those of others seems to be somewhere between flattery and a shout-off (Figure 6).⁵

For parrots, all politics are vocal, so in captivity, they turn this talent for aural connection on all manner of household entities. When they’ve lived with you for a while, they’ll start up the flattery of mimicry. They listen for household catchphrases, “Good morning,” “Good dog.” They’ll also learn proper context and sometimes express themselves with meanings corresponding to ours. Humans find this charming, but it’s born out of desperation. In a duetting partner, they seek a sexual mate, or a buddy for foraging in the forest. Doane and Qualkinbush tell only half the story when they say: “Parrots relate to us because they wish to, not because it has been bred into them.” ⁶ What they leave unsaid is that they wish to relate to us only when they are isolated from their own kind.

Even then, parrots do not always tolerate us. Some taken from the wild never become tame. A Danish grey parrot keeper who had experience of more and less tamed birds shared his opinion that “wild” parrots could be “real screamers.” He did not recommend wild parrots to anyone with “weak nerves.” He elaborated: “In my experience, Grey Parrots caught as adult never become tame. They do not lose their fear of people, but start screaming as soon as one comes near their cage. This is rather terrible, the voice being something between that of a pig and a cow, and continuing until one leaves.” ⁷ Capitalizing on the inheritance of a forest ecology is a hit-or-miss way to make companions of animals.

If it is so bad, how have parrots ever become popular pets? The Danish parrot keeper stated the key qualification, that “wild birds caught as an adult never become tame.” Centuries of experience, particularly the cultures of taming in the Americas, taught people that catching the birds young made all the difference.⁸ Traders in Africa who took the chicks from the nest began socializing them to create more appealing merchandise. The sailors who brought them to other continents continued to train the growing chicks (figure 7). The young parrots became habituated to people and could function as pets. This is how the species got its reputation as delightful mimics. So yes, greys can adjust to captivity and human company. In the absence of parrot companions, they can form mutually appreciative relationships with people, especially if captured young or raised as hatchlings.

Parenting Parrots

The 1989 New York Times article that proclaimed parrots to be the fashionable pet of the late twentieth century attested they were not “the messy, quarrelsome parrots from Asia, Africa and South America. These are new, improved birds—serene and affectionate creatures bred in captivity and hand-fed since birth.” ⁹ Besides conveying imperialist prejudices against three separate continents, that sentence explains how the apartment dwellers of the 1980s avoided the screaming: they purchased bespoke parrots who would give a superior performance as pets. 

Handfeeding involves taking unweaned chicks from their parents at about three weeks. They are put in cages and tended round-the-clock by human caregivers, who use a syringe or spoon to feed them warm gruel. This is an intensive and expensive practice. Why do, or pay other people to do, what parent birds would do for free? Humans have never been husbands to parrots; therefore, if they are to be pets, people must act as their parents. Not having domesticated the species, breeders impose intensive discipline on each individual juvenile. Handfeeding is the key to successful human domination of the species in the Anthropocene.

Handfeeding was the route to creating a better pet because chicks bond with human caregivers. A late twentieth-century parrot owners summarized it perfectly: “A hand-fed bird often identifies more with people than with birds.”⁹ Another gushed: “I would always advise anyone to buy a hand-reared bird—you can do anything with them because there is absolute trust. I can turn Little Hen upside down and swing her like a basket and she’s perfectly delighted. The trust never goes.” ¹⁰ Research has validated these consumer impressions: hand-fed parrots seem to be more likely to be comfortable with people and imitate them than birds raised by their parents are(figure 8). Parrots who mimic people are just what the market demands!

Creating such close relations with baby birds is possible—or considered possible—because of the capacity of baby birds to imprint on other species. The pioneering ethologist Konrad Lorenz first described the phenomenon of avian imprinting in the 1930s: keeping graylag geese, he discovered they identify with members of their own species only through conditioning, meaning exposure at an early developmental age. If they encounter another species at that developmental crossroads, they imprint on it. Photographs showing Lorenz followed by a train of imprinted geese made the discovery famous.¹¹

Geese, ducks, and chickens are precocial species, whose hatchlings are downy, have open eyes, and can walk soon after emerging from the egg. Parrots, in contrast, are altricial species, meaning “the hatchling is born without plumage, with closed eyes, limited locomotor activity and stay in the nest for prolonged periods requiring parental care.” Altricial birds require more parental involvement for a longer period; parrots will not instantly imprint on a caregiver in the manner of geese, but with time, they will attach. The attachment that parrot chicks form with those who care for them has become a resource for the pet industry and has served as a mechanism for bringing the species under human domination.¹² But less appealing behavior accompanies the mimicking.¹³ Handfeeding, like domestication, is double-edged.

Handfeeding and Its Discontents

Handfeeding, the luxury enhancement to parrot production, is now controversial (figure 9). While it may accustom parrots to human company, it does not necessarily prepare them to be pleasant companions in cages in human homes. Some experienced parrot keepers have observed that handfed parrots are likely to develop emotional and behavioral challenges as they mature. This is an unresolved question. The evidence is anecdotal, and because maladaptation to captivity appears in both wild-caught and handfed birds, conclusions are elusive.

Too much familiarity with the human species may make parrots worse pets. For example, some owners think hand-fed birds are even noisier than wild-caught ones because they learned to squawk for food when human caregivers did not feed them as regularly as their parents would have. If squawking elicits a person to respond to them, they will keep it up as adults. The problems become more complicated around the bird’s sexual maturation. Both wild-caught birds and aviary-raised parrots will choose their favorites among the residents of the household. Any parrot may become broody and aggressive during mating season, but handfed birds have fewer hesitations about bonding to people. Their sexual overtures to humans may be less inhibited than those of wild-caught birds. Therefore, many people try to re-home their parrots, and sanctuaries are overflowing. ¹⁴ 

“Too much familiarity with the human species may make parrots worse pets.”

To be fair, some experienced breeders and pet trainers have told me that the problem is not handfeeding itself. Some experts say that hand-fed birds can be well-adapted pets who do not act out sexually or otherwise with people. They say the scale of production and collective handfeeding in commercial aviaries is the problem; as Rosemary Low put it, “if you reared 40 human babies and children together, without real parental care, just adults to look after their physical needs, you would not expect to produce well-adjusted children. It is the same for parrots.” Training after the chick leaves the aviary also makes a difference. Former breeder Phoebe Linden believes that a well-raised, hand-fed chick can avoid behavioral problems if new owners resolve not to provide them food and attention on demand. But many do not.¹⁵

Compounding the problem is the fact that artificial selection will take place, but not in ways to create better pets. Today, the great majority of grey parrot-producing facilities are in South Africa, where the climate is friendly, agriculture is well-capitalized and the labor to feed chicks one at a time is cheap (figure 10). Inevitably, the birds best adapted to life in avicultural facilities will produce the most offspring. Their chicks are exported with no reports back to the producers about the qualities of their breeding lines as pets. Because parrots in captivity rarely breed, those parrots who prove themselves best adapted to life with humans are lost to the future of the species.

For handfed parrots to become pets, they must each learn to do it, one at a time, in a process of early intervention that conditions them for a life contrary to their developmental tendencies. As Thom van Dooren has said of other human management of avian life, handfeeding is a “regime of violent-care.” It is an imposition of discipline. The biopolitics of this relationship are classically Foucauldian: “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”¹⁶ Yet, the bio-political effect that handfeeding imposes on the species is counter to the intent of fostering life. It turns out that even in production facilities, hand-fed chicks do not make good breeding stock; they are often disinterested in reproducing with their own kind. A 2019 petition from a Florida aviculturist to the US Fish and Wildlife Service to import breeding stock from South Africa reported that grey parrot breeding in the US was collapsing, in part because a good proportion of the potential breeding stock had been handfed. The petition claimed that male parrots“simply do not know how to perform the necessary task of mating” with female birds.”¹⁷

Read part one here. Part three will be published in our next issue.

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1. Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm, 2003), 4.[↩]
2. Pat Shipman, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, (Harvard University Press, 2015); Virginia Morell, “How Wolf Became Dog,” Scientific American, 1 July, 2015, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wolf-became-dog/; Juliet Clutton-Brock, Animals as Domesticates: A World View through History (Michigan State University Press, 2013); Tim Ingold, “From Trust to Domination: An Alternative History of Human-Animal Relations,” in Animals and Human Society: Changing Perspectives, ed. Aubrey Manning and James Serpell (Routledge, 1994).[↩]
3. George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds, vol. III (Printed for the author, 1743).[↩]
4. Bonnie Munro Doane and Thomas Qualkinbush, My Parrot, My Friend: An Owner’s Guide to Parrot Behavior (Macmillan, 1994), 1.[↩]
5. New understandings of parrot vocalizations are emerging in behavioral ecology and ethology. The following research has inspired my summary of its findings: Karl S. Berg et al., “Contact Calls Are Used for Individual Mate Recognition in Free-Ranging Green-Rumped Parrotlets, Forpus Passerinus,” Animal Behaviour 81 (2011); Karl S. Berg et al., “Vertical Transmission of Learned Signatures in a Wild Parrot,” Proceedings: Biological Sciences 279, no. 1728 (2012): 585-591; Catherine Toft and Timothy Wright, Parrots of the Wild: A Natural History of the World’s Most Captivating Birds (University of California, 2015); Jack W. Bradbury and Thorsten J. S. Balsby, “The Functions of Vocal Learning in Parrots,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 70 (2016): 293-312; Alan B. Bond and Judy Diamond, Thinking Like a Parrot: Perspectives from the Wild (University of Chicago, 2019); Grace Smith-Vidaurre, Marcelo Araya-Salas, and Timothy F Wright, “Individual Signatures Outweigh Social Group Identity in Contact Calls of a Communally Nesting Parrot,” Behavioral Ecology 31, (2019): 448-458.[↩]
6. Doane and Qualkinbush, My Parrot, My Friend: An Owner’s Guide to Parrot Behavior, 4.[↩]
7. W. Langberg, “Successful Breeding of African Grey Parrots in Denmark,” Avicultural Magazine 64 (1958): 57–64, quotation from 57.[↩]
8. Indigenous parrot keeping in the Americas: Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University, 2023).[↩]
9. Hirsch, “Parrots, Urban Pets of the Moment.”[↩][↩]
10. Atha, “Parrot Passion,” 165.[↩]
11. Konrad Z. Lorenz, “The Companion in the Bird’s World,” The Auk 54 (1937): 245-273; Tania Munz, “My Goose Child Martina: The Multiple Uses of Geese in the Writings of Konrad Lorenz,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 41, (2011): 405-446.[↩]
12. D. Mota-Rojas et al., “Parental Behavior and Newborn Attachment in Birds: Life History Traits and Endocrine Responses,” Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2023): 1-13, quotation from 1. One of the arguments for handfeeding was to produce chicks of endangered species, even if the parents were not amenable to raising them. The problem was that chicks who had bonded with people could not be returned to the wild. Conservation breeders therefore used hand puppets who looked like the parent birds to feed the chicks: Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University, 2014), 99.[↩]
13. Rebecca Fox, “Hand-Rearing: Behavioral Impacts and Implications for Captive Parrot Welfare,” in Manual of Parrot Behavior, ed. Andrew U. Luescher 2008): 83-91. Judging from articles in the American Federation of Aviculture magazine, handfeeding remained novel in the late 1970s and early 1980s.[↩]
14. Rachel Schmid, Marcus Georg Doherr, and Andreas Steiger, “The Influence of the Breeding Method on the Behaviour of Adult African Grey Parrots (Psittacus erithacus),” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 98 (2006): 293-307; Fox, “Hand-Rearing: Behavioral Impacts and Implications for Captive Parrot Welfare”; Fern Van Sant, “Problem Sexual Behaviors of Companion Parrots,” in Manual of Parrot Behavior, ed. Andrew U. Luescher (Blackwell, 2008); Phoebe Greene Linden and Andrew U. Luescher, “Behavioral Development of Psittacine Companions: Neonates, Neophytes, and Fledglings,” in Manual of Parrot Behavior, ed. Andrew U. Luescher 2008): 93-111; J. Miesle, Hand-Raised or Parent-Raised: Which Is Better for the Birds? Avian Health and Disease, (International Veterinary Information Service, 2022).[↩]
15. Rosemary Low, “Weaning Parrots with Patience and Understanding,” Avizandum 15 (December 2003), 24. Phoebe Linden, personal communication, 3 November 2024.[↩]
16. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (Pantheon, 1978), 138.[↩]
17. Paul Marolf, Jason Mitchell, and Ray O’Neill, Federal Fish and Wildlife Permit Application Form, 18 March 2019 (Falls Church, Virginia; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Division of Management Authority), 153. The application includes many letters from grey parrot breeders whose stock has become unproductive because the wild-caught birds are too old to reproduce and the handfed ones are disinclined, including the one quoted by Jean Pattison, 20 February 2019.[↩]