The mid-century London stage actress and bird aficionado Nancy Price reports in her homage to parrots, Bright Pinions, that His Majesty King George V owned a beloved African Grey Parrot named Charlotte.  “She viewed State and confidential documents with a critical eye from her favorite perch on the King’s shoulder,” Price writes, “and sometimes, when feeling that matters demanded active intervention, she would call out in a strident seafaring voice, ‘What about it?’” African Greys, as Price clearly knew, can be as smart as humans are gullible, and as ready to mimic our speech as we are delighted by seeing ourselves in the mirror of nature. 

But no African Grey was as smart or as capable of manipulating human sympathies as Alex, the brilliant feathered hero of Alex & Me, by Irene Pepperberg.

By the time he died at age thirty-one, Alex had the intelligence of a human five-year-old.  Pepperberg, his lifelong observer and handler, reports that he had a vocabulary of over 150 words, knew how to distinguish simple shapes and basic colors, and could even recognize the quantities represented by Arabic numerals up to six.  Most famously, Alex learned to read letters by matching phonemes with colors: he could identify what sound was represented by differently-colored plastic refrigerator letters.  “What sound is blue?” Pepperberg would ask, pointing to a blue S.  “Sss,” Alex would answer.  Then, he would almost always demand, “Want a nut.”  Once, when his treat was not forthcoming, he turned to Pepperberg and impatiently said, “Want a nut.  Nnn…uh…tuh.”  He understood that words were composed of individual phonemes, that symbols in our alphabet corresponded to sounds, and that those sounds could be combined in various ways to create a coherent system of meaning. 

To Pepperberg’s eyes, he was an astonishing vindication of the idea of animal intelligence, proof that the perceived binary between animal and human is not as sharp as we had imagined it to be.  His quickness and his seeming humanness — borne out by these experiments and by many others — earned him the roles of exemplary and symbol for the animal rights movement, and for the research that opposed behaviorism and favored an idea of active animal thinking.

Alex was also a quick study when it came to other qualities we once thought were distinct to human intelligence: for example, condescension, manipulation, and self-assurance.  Once, Pepperberg dangled a string with an almond tied to it from his perch, in the hopes that he would (like the other parrots in her lab) pull up the string with his beak and take the nut, thus demonstrating a sophisticated sense of spatial awareness and problem-solving skills.  Alex had other ideas, however:

He looked down at the nut and looked at me.  He did nothing.  I was wondering what he was thinking.  After a few seconds he said, “Pick up nut.” 
I was a bit taken aback.  I said, “No, Alex, you pick up nut.”
He looked right back at me and said, “Pick up nut!” a little more insistently this time. 

Alex, as Pepperberg later observes, showed for the first time on that day signs of the sometimes endearing and often unfortunate anthropomorphic tendency towards entitlement.  “Once Alex had learned to label objects and request things,” Pepperberg observes, “he relished the control it gave him over his environment, the ability to manipulate the people around him.”  Alex was an adorable and slightly petty Adam-in-reverse: the animal that finally took back the act of naming from men, and, yea, ate freely of every tree in the Garden.  And eat he does: the laboratory is at his beck and call, treating him to nuts, bananas, cherries, and apples (which he insists on calling “banerries” — something in between a banana and a cherry.  “Ap-ple” says Pepperberg over and over again, trying to get Alex to learn the new word through her careful emphasis.  “Ban-erry,” responds Alex, clearly above the exercise).

In her 1952 book of parrot lore, Nancy Price also reports that the Maharajah of Nawanagar had a parrot that rode around in a customized Rolls Royce, and had been issued a diplomatic passport by his doting master, so that they could travel together more easily.  I imagine that Alex would have naturally fit into such a lifestyle.  In the lab, Alex adopted nothing short of Imperial airs.  He broke in new research assistants by going through his entire repertoire of demands.  He berated the other parrots whenever they proved slow in learning how to accomplish a task (“Say better,” he would admonish them; or, when feeling particularly mischievous, he would shout out the wrong answer, further confusing his less-dazzling cage mates).  And he made certain to punish those insubordinates — including his handlers — who dared challenge his authority.  Once, a friend of Pepperberg’s stopped by the lab, and offered Alex a grape.  “I want walnut,” he replied.  She tried to reason with him, saying gently, “You eat too many nuts.  Irene said to offer you fruit.”  “I want walnut,” he replied again.  Finally, about to give up on the grapes, she heard him ask for water.  She held out his cup, he drank two sips, and then, in retaliation for the withheld nut, “contemptuously” tossed it to the floor.

Such behavior in a human is usually the source of frustration, but in a bird, of course, it is a source of delight.  Why is this, exactly?  Is it because we are thrilled to find that we as a species are not alone in having feelings and intelligence?  Is it because we as a species have a need to project those feelings onto the rest of the surrounding world, enacting and re-enacting Ruskin’s Pathetic Fallacy?  Can it be reduced to the fact that animals are amusing?  Or is it because we actually do seem, as Pepperberg claims, to make contact with a reality larger and deeper than the one that is superficially apparent in our daily lives when we see real agency and emotions in other beings?

All of these possible answers — as enormous and grave as they may seem for such a short book — are clearly visible in the background of Alex & Me.  During his lifetime, Alex became a much-debated symbol of human-animal relations: to his detractors, Alex represented Pepperberg’s self-delusion, a clever mimic manipulated by a woman desperate to prove her intuitions about birds.  To his supporters, meanwhile, Alex stood for a touching but also startlingly weighty sense of hope.  When he died, a community of Benedictine nuns wrote to Pepperberg, expressing their sadness and their belief that African Grays “have shown us something more of God than we could have ever believed possible.”  Another mourner wrote to credit Alex with having saved her life: bed-ridden and crippled by a heart arrhythmia, this woman was inspired to fight to stay alive because of the possibility that a parrot “could not only speak, but could know — could absolutely understand — what he heard and what he said.”

And it is perhaps this absolute understanding that is the most moving and difficult problem that Alex’s story raises: can an animal understand?  And, perhaps still harder to answer, can we understand what it means for an animal to understand?  This is the problem that Flaubert tackles in A Simple Heart — a short story about a country servant and the parrot she loves more than anything else.  The bird becomes like a son to the simple Félicité, who is beset by tragedy in the rest of her life.  “Loulou” repeats the three or four sentences he has learned. She murmurs back at him from the depths of her being, certain that she has finally found a listener.  And perhaps she has: even though Loulou may not understand every word, it is possible that his living presence may be enough to constitute true empathy, to embody genuine contact between human and animal.

But Flaubert is not willing to let us believe in this mutual understanding without reservations.  When Loulou dies, later in the story, it drives Félicité to a sacral madness, and she constructs a shrine around his now-stuffed body, which she believes to be possessed by the Holy Spirit; her joy is re-cast into a projection of rituals and religion.  In this case, the human desire for understanding seems to surpass the possible limits of mutual interaction — the bird has died, but Félicité continues to imbue Loulou with a desperate aura of hope.  Félicité fervently believes that the non-human world speaks a redemptive language of forgiveness and love, one that the human world has distinctly failed to provide for her.   It comes as no surprise to a reader who has tried to empathize with this fervent belief that Félicité dies with the wild vision of a gigantic parrot descending from an opening in the heavens, leading her towards salvation.

In linking animals to salvation, both Pepperberg and Flaubert belong to a tradition that stretches at least to the middle ages.  Some of the earliest works of zoology were the medieval bestiaries – encyclopedias of animals which offered a description of their fundamental traits, and also a symbolic treatment of their role in the larger scheme of a holy, divinely-ruled cosmos.  Every trait conveniently fit into the larger scheme of sin and salvation that governed the medieval worldview.  In a twelfth-century manuscript translated by T.H. White as the Book of Beasts, for example, the Beaver is praised for his gentleness, and because “his testicles make a capital medicine.”  Not only that, but when “he notices he is being pursued by the hunter, he removes his own testicles with a bite, and casts them before the sportsman, and thus escapes by flight.”  There is, of course, a lesson in all of this:

Hence every man who inclines toward the commandment of God and who wants to live chastely, must cut off from himself all vices, all motions of lewdness, and must cast them from him in the Devil’s face.  Thereupon the Devil, seeing him to have nothing of his own about him, goes away from him confused.

For all of its belabored work with metaphor, a fundamental vulnerability lurks behind this passage.  The anonymous bestiary-authors had a deep desire to believe that we do not walk the tight-rope between heaven and damnation alone.  Instead, they wanted to believe that the entire universe was sympathetic to the dangerous and uncertain project of existence.  For them, animals represented various moral and spiritual aspects of that project — and, as a result of embodying these aspects, also understood and empathized with our own attempts to live correctly.  Elephants shared man’s modesty after the fall because, in their embarrassment, they copulated back-to-back; crocodiles shared in the shame of hypocrites because they secretly spent their nights in the filth of water while innocently passing their days on dry land.  Within the rigid and intractable world-system of medieval Christianity, these mysterious animals provided an outlet for sympathy.  In these beings, possessed of an animation and vivacity like our own, the medieval scribes saw both kindred sinners and pious companions.  They were a blank canvas on which to paint human allegories, precisely because so much fullness and life were palpably but indescribably present in them — each animal was full of life, but full of a life so indeterminate that a fantasy could easily be projected onto it.

This combination of projected human hopes and an outwardly-radiating animal life-force has much to do with Alex’s life.  He rapidly became a symbol of hope not simply because he was capable of mimicking human intelligence, but because he hinted with his every action at an incomparably deeper animal intelligence — an intelligence that no one ever understood, but one that was clearly felt by Pepperberg, and by the many others who had so much invested in him.  “Alex left us as a magician might exit the stage,” she concludes, “leaving us awestruck at what we’d seen, and wondering what other secrets remained hidden.”  The thought that nature might be hiding some universal notion of sympathy and intelligence at the bottom of its unknowable core is a powerful and redemptive thought, and Pepperberg and Alex deserve our gratitude for bringing it up again at this moment in history.  Pepperberg might have understood what led the bestiary-scribe to write of the Parrot, “If you did not see it, you would think it was a real man talking.”  But, perhaps more importantly, she might understand that if you did see it, and looked into its eyes, you might see something older and more atavistic than a real man — the elusive, shared shiver of being alive.       

 Matthew Spellberg ‘09 likes talking to ducks more than parrots. But he likes talking to parrots, too.