AJ, The Basketball-Playing Bird

Very funny. Now I want a bird.

Very impressive! It always amazes me to see what you can train animals to do. I still remember watching the video of birds playing ping-pong in my high school psych class. Very cool!

Amazing.

Cockatoos are common here in Oz. An aunt has one older than me...and arguably wiser.

At the start, was it auditioning for a Monty Python sketch?

Bob

What I was noticing was how lovely his feathers are. That bird looks so healthy, so clearly he likes what he is doing.

Adorable! Now I wanna teach Pepper how to play dead. :)

It always dismays me to see humans teaching parrots to do human actvities-is this too harsh?

My experience with all sorts of parrots is that they are happy enough to play along with the strange things their humans may want, and doing so is more fun for them than not. If they are left on their own, they get bored, irritable and unhappy; they are intensely social, curious, intelligent and playful birds when they get a chance to be, and respond well to any sort of "game". They don't like doing the same thing over and over and over, if they have any choice, but they don't seem to mind learning.

I'd feel a lot worse for the poor bird, Larry, if it were just stuck in a cage with no-one to interact with.

i might have agreed with you long long ago, larry, before i lived with parrots.

but as you might know, i have lived with parrots for most of my life. i have found that, as luna says, parrots love to play games. parrots are brilliant and inventive and they want to relate to (and manipulate -- in a good way) their environment because they crave social interaction. my parrots are always inventing games to play with me (i think of these games as my parrots' scientific experiments), and i try to accomodate them because i enjoy it, they enjoy it, and it gives them a sense of having some control over their world.

besides that, to train a parrot to do amazing things, such as larry the ringnecked parrot, it requires a close relationship exist between the person and the parrot. birds are difficult to train through fear: they "perform" because it is intellectually and emotionally satisfying to them.