Boids

Oops, jailing talking birds seems to be backfiring.

A British wildlife park has hatched a new plan to rehabilitate its potty-mouthed parrots after they unleashed a tide of expletives.

Back in 2020, five foul-mouthed African gray parrots, donated to Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in eastern England, were isolated from the flock in an attempt to improve their language.
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“When we came to move them, the language that came out of their carrying boxes was phenomenal, really bad. Not normal swear words, these were proper expletives,” the park’s chief executive, Steve Nichols, told CNN.

“We’ve put eight really, really offensive, swearing parrots with 92 non-swearing ones,” he said.
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The park has installed large signs warning visitors about the parrots’ language, but Nichols said it hasn’t received a single complaint.

In fact, historically, “we did hear a lot more customers swearing at parrots than we did parrots swearing at customers,” Nichols said.  (source)

The park visitors are the ones teaching the parrots 'naughty' words. It’s totally not cool to blame the poor, imprisoned birds for repeating what they hear. You’re gonna lock them up in a country where the weather is much colder than their homeland? You limit them to a flock that’s 1/10th the size of their natural social group? They’re accustomed to flying free in lowland forests and you put them in a cage? They’re on the endangered species list specifically due to the actions of us stupid humans.

African grey parrots have declined significantly in the wild in recent decades, due primarily to excessive trapping for the international pet trade. They are also threatened by habitat loss due to deforestation in many parts of their range. (source)

…but sure, blame the poor parrots for what we've done to them and their homes. Fer fuck's sake, parrots are just doing what parrots do. Go ahead and take some of their few remaining, meager joys because THINK OF THE CHILDREN! Dimes to doughnuts, these precious kiddles have heard all the parrot expletives before.

I only mention it but it was quite the risky move to put the eight colorfully vocabularied birds into a flock of 92 non-sweary parrots. The zoo could well have ended up with a hundred profanity spewing boids instead of just eight. It’d serve the wildlife jailers right.

Also, to my mind, the folks in charge are missing out on a big moneymaking attraction. I’d travel a long way and pay big boodles to witness a flock of cursing African Grays. I'm not the only one.

Sure, I’m deaf so I wouldn’t actually hear them BUT Ten could hold up my voice-to-text tablet so I’d still get the experience.