Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

"in order to access this functionality, you must first chew through the charging cable"

And that's to say nothing of the parrot ad click farms.

I had an Amazon parrot that needed less attention than an African Gray or a Cockatoo.

I'd still not recommend as a pet given that their lifespans are so long. It's a decades long commitment and they may even outlast you, in which case you need to figure out what's going to happen to them.

So I don't agree at all that by not using violence all the time we're going against our nature.

But in the case of food, I believe we are, because evidently we require certain substances to survive, and one of the best ways to get those is to eat meat. In most regions where humans live today, without meat or foods imported from faraway regions, we couldn't survive.

> We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators.

I don't know... you may see that in an environment heavily modified by humans, like National Parks or zoos... but in really wild environments, there would be a healthy population of predators that "control" the population of those animals they hunt, so it seems it's almost inevitable that if you're prey, in a real wild environment, you would need to be on your toes absolutely all the time. This is what I've observed from the little interactions I had with really wild environments.

> Do you think that two angry humans killing each other over a conflict is the same thing as industrial scale genocide with labor camps?

That's a weird questions to ask, I don't see any relation whatsoever with what is being discussed.

The evidence is that most of our existence we hunted and gathered nomadically.

[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/developmen...

Also, the debunking likely refers to the really old progressivist idea that any species that went extinct must have done so because it was inherently "inferior", instead of less well adapted to whatever changes the environment threw at them.

Either way, from what I understand the most recent well-supported theories of what caused neanderthal extinction is that their basal metabolic rate was so much higher compared to ours (due to adaptations to the ice age), that this simple caloric difference gave their body plan a long-term disadvantage over ours after the ice age ended[0].

And when I say "body plan" I refer to the part where apparently early humans and Neanderthals interbred so often that about 20% of Neanderthal DNA is still present in the modern human gene pool, and most humans have about 1 to 4% neanderthal DNA[1]. Similarly DNA from homo sapiens has also been found in neanderthal remains[2].

So were kind of reaching this point where Neanderthals and Denovisans seem to not quite match the definition that most people use when they say "different species". Our ancestors interbred a lot, and the genes that were advantageous stuck around. At that point using the word "extinction" without caveats becomes a bit misleading I think.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6d3uHSFxkM

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2FatwFjc-8

We know we are able to teach children language because we have shared modes of communication through which we can observe their learning; speaking, writing, hand gestures.

> You do not need to share a language to teach a language

True, but I would argue that you need to share a mutually intelligible mode of communication.

How would you teach (and know that they have understood it correctly) the concept of monetary denominations to a 7-year old child if you were limited to communicating on the level you can with a crow? I have no idea, and would probably give up. But this does not necessarily tell us anything about the intelligence or capacity for learning language in the child, it tells us only of the gap in communication that we cannot bridge.

> so animals at least doesn’t have the same level of language intelligence as humans do.

This does not necessarily follow. What follows is that humans are not able to teach animals human language on the same level as they are able to teach humans.

Given that there is no known means to effectively communicate with animals, we are restricted to tests that do not demand shared communication to identify intelligence. These tests must be benchmarked on mutually unintelligible humans.

For instance, a grade school Chinese exam might be a good way of gauging the intelligence of Chinese children, but is a terrible way of gauging the intelligence of French children. Such a test is lousy in certain domains. We must be cognizant of such testing methodology limits in the design of animal intelligence tests.

tl;dr A test that would fail animals and speakers of a different language are not good tests. An animal intelligence test needs to at least pass all humans of comparable intelligence regardless of language to reach the bare minimum of acceptability.

But there was one day when they met their match. Another pair of geese appeared like magic. Just wandering around like they owned the place. The original pair were not happy. They hissed and waved their wings in anger. The new pair did the same. Uncowed. The original pair decided to charge the interlopers and chase them off. Lowered their necks. Went full speed at them. Then slammed into the glass doors because they were attacking their own reflections.

They spent the rest of the day, greatly humbled, swimming around the office park pond. Gave everyone a break for a couple of days before resuming the usual CEO & secretary hunt.