I've thought about getting a pet turtle or tortoise [1] because they are my favorite animal, but I found out that in order for them to be happy and healthy they need a lot more room than I could easily fit in my house. Either a very large aquarium or a very large area for them to walk around depending on the species, neither of which I can easily have in my house.
And I think a lot of animals are like that. Ultimately a lot of these animals evolved in areas that really aren't that "confined" in any meaningful sense, and forcing confines seems kind of cruel.
[1] To be clear, ethically, not one of those shady endangered black market things that you can find.
Totally agree on more rare/exotic animals though - they shouldn't be subject to unnatural conditions like this.
Now, even if we leave our doors open he prefers to stay inside the house with his little brother Vicente, another cat we adopted. We regularly make new toys and play with them.
Vicente has been with us since he was around 1 month old (now 6 months old) so he's way more curious about the outside. We are preparing to start walking them out though I have a feeling we will have to drag Ramón out of the house.
I wouldn't feel bad for confining your cats to your house! They are probably very happy :)
This just seems obvious to me, but I've been around animals my entire life.
(I'm personally uncomfortable with birds being caged for long periods or in confined spaces, and I'm not offering the above as a justification. I don't own or live with any animals.)
That said, the going theory about why some birds choose to nest in cavities is lower mortality rate in their young. Birds who nest in boxes typically have more babies per clutch than those that do not so perhaps that's it? I take that more as no one really knows why one species does while another of similar size does not.
Another random observation is most large birds walk and smaller birds hop. That's not always true either, since blue jays hop and crows will walk and sometimes hop. Hummingbirds cannot do either and just shuffle side to side on perches.
I guess I'm trying to say there's exceptions to the rules in bird behavior, but they're more outliers.
[1] https://brighamstephen.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...
Birds burn a ton of energy flying (at least the birds in question here, other birds can glide for long times), it's not something they would willingly do to no ends.
He knows when we are leaving him when we say goodbye - the garage door opening - the car - the gate opening and closing.
During the day he sits in the home office with me and my office days he is around my daughter.
Most of the time he sits on the top or the side of the cage perching on wooden sticks.
Occasionally he will dismount if the gardening services are busy making a racket with the weed whacker and will walk to the bathroom and climb to the top of the shower.
The one cage is close to an outside gate so he will climb on the window or the gate itself during summer.
We also have 3 cats, but he just walks past them, and he talks and even scolds them in my voice.
Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel.
That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
And how do you objectively come to this conclusion? Could you say a human prisoner can learn to cope in a prison and present "psychologically" well, but it still feel like a form of torture?
Your entire comment screams of a PETA ad warning about cruelty to ferrets without realizing that domesticated ferrets literally can and will not survive in nature in 99% of cases. Their "wild" instincts are gone. Cats aren't nearly as helpless, but are similarly co-evolved to domestic life.
Pretty sure cats love climbing things, and stairs are no different.
One of our cats has arthritis and before we got her treatment she didn’t like them, but she’s perfectly happy now.
One day Seven of Nine might be eaten by a raccoon but I’ve seen the GoPro footage, she has a blast every day of her life. As a side-effect benefit, she doesn’t play games with me because her entire world is filled with games she can play herself. We still sleep curled up together though :)
I’ll throw it back at you, maybe if you left that meeting you would find that it had less consequences than you are imagining.
But when humans do it’s unnatural?
And besides, if you saw how hairy I am you’d probably reconsidered your opinion.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cat-brains-have-sh...
And smaller brains
Aren’t mutually exclusive
https://petapixel.com/2026/03/24/wildlife-photographer-of-th...
Then further down the page, "A sika deer carries the interlocked severed head of a rival male that had died after their battle". Nature, eh.
My indoor-outdoor cat only catches small animals if they run between her paws. But she did chase a rather large raccoon around the house once, as I did.
In my suburban neighborhood, we occasionally have coyotes. They are known to prey on fat cats (the feline kind).
My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown.
I also feel that small wild cats were likely native everywhere. Birds were probably not their primary prey; small reptiles and mammals, i.e. animals that don't fly, nest in trees, or live in flocks.
It’s just something we’ve all been told all our lives, with the people doing the telling never point to any evidence to back it up.
Even when cats are wild and native, their hunts aren’t particularly successful, except the desert sand cat[1] which is so small it would perish if its hunts were low rate success.
And if you watch videos of collar cameras on cats, they seem to spent all their time doing a perimeter check, having a quick social interaction with other cats doing the same, and maybe brushing up against a frigidly neighbour human.
The idea that a house cat that has warmth, food, water, bedding, would bother to waste time killing small birds and mammals that have hardly any meat on them anyway is fairly unbelievable.
Feral cats are a different story. But don’t blame responsible cat owners for that problem.
I was at a wildlife sanctuary in Tasmania, about 50 minutes drive from where I live.
The tour guide said something like: every year 250,000 native animals are killed every year on Tasmanian roads.
And I just blurted out: and they just keep coming.
Because, obviously, if it was a problem then that number wouldn’t be sustained. It’s kind of self evident that the deceased animals free up resources and territory for the living animals, who then go on to have more offspring.
I feel the same about cats: if they were a problem for the native fauna, we’d expect that problem to have auto-resolved by now, as in the cats would have killed all the native fauna.
But, like all environmental problems, it’s perennial: the problem always needs more funding, more restrictions on human activity, increased red tape for developers, and home owners who want to manage their land. Like you can cut a tree down until after it falls on your house and kills your infant.
Again, I don’t believe it’s well fed house cats that are allowed outside that are the problem, it’s the ferals that need to kill to survive.
And there are ways to solve that problem, or at least greatly curtail it.
They’ll devastate anything farmers intend to do.
They’re public enemy number one here in Australia.
As a side note, FWIW, we only let our cats outside when we are there to watch them. This is because we don't want our neighbors to dislike our cats for whatever reason. A lot of neighbors use Roundup on their fence lines. And, of course, car traffic.
We have some feral colonies set up in places like Miami and San Francisco, but not all species thrive in warm locations.
That said, my palm sized green cheek conure is rarely in his extremely large cage (it's 4 by 4 feet). Door is always open unless he's sleeping or we're out of the house. Usually he's with me on my shoulder when I'm working during the day and gives his "2 cents" when I'm in meetings.
Most parrots kept as pets prefer it locked for security reasons. He'll get anxious if it's not when he's trying to sleep.
I've seen a lot of terrible bird owners, but I also know plenty that enrich their bird's lives. My little conure has a surprisingly extensive vocabulary for a species not known for speaking.
He says "poo" when when he has to poop, "what's up?" when he greets anyone, "whatcha doing", "<his name>", "yeah!" (mimicking Little Jon), "stop" (when he doesn't like what we're doing), "good boy", "Love you" and a few others I can't recall off the top of my head.
I guess I did teach him to say "yeah!". It became his alternative to express any excitable emotion instead of screaming. Usually comes with a little head bob at the same time for additional cuteness. He heard the song "Mi Gente" in a commercial once and when they say "yeah yeah yeah", out of nowhere he I hear him respond back with a "yeah!".
The first thing he learned was his name, "Willy", and for the longest time I thought he would just be a Pokemon...forever saying his name with different intonations depending on what he was trying to imply. I think he picked that up within his first year or so. Then he learned a few more. After 6 years he might be up to 12-16 now. Could be more, but he says a lot of gibberish that hasn't formed into words quite yet.
Perhaps my favorite is when he says he's a "good boy" and he just did something bad. Little jerk knows exactly what he's saying, but we love him anyways.
I can't really get him to do tricks yet, other than spinning in a circle. He's highly treat motivated, so anything that results in getting food will usually work if you keep at it. I'm trying to get him to try on a flight harness so we can take him out and about with us more often. He likes people, but he could be more socialized.
Guessing you have a green cheek as well? We have a cinnamon variation. I think they're a bit odd, but that could be GCCs in general as we've only had 1 and a budgie.
Not saying there isn't and somewhat offtopic, but if you apply this to LLMs those are much, much 'smarter' than all the animals people like to call intelligent (or something similar). If you disagree, please tell me for which task requiring intelligence you'd rather have an animal's wit than that of an LLM.
I really do feel we should be taking the current state of affairs as a starting point to recalibrate what counts as smart or worth 'protecting', whether it's our beloved animal friends or something inorganic. Simultaneously believing "birds are super smart" and "LLMs are just stochastic parrots" seems absurd.
Navigating your way to a location without colliding with anything. Finding food in the woods. Such stuff that animals can do that we yet have AI be able to do.
People way overestimate the actually intelligent part of LLMs vs simply being good at recalling context-related stuff from the training data.
LLMs can (more often) successfully find solutions for far more complex problems than animals can. So where does that leave us?
And 'trained' clearly means it is not something based in intelligence, but in repetition and conditioning.
Answer the actual question.
> answer the actual question
I literally did. You asked, which task that requires intelligence would I rather use an animal over an Llm. I'd much rather have a dog as my guide dog than an Llm. It can use it's innate intelligence to sense danger, navigate around obstacles it's never seen before, and even communicate with other humans through barking.
> trained clearly means it is not something based in intelligence, but in repetition and conditioning
I can't tell if you're trolling at this point. Llms are also trained and therefore are based on repetition and conditioning.
I see you dropped "sniffing out drugs" as a task requiring intelligence, that's a start.
> It can use it's innate intelligence to sense danger
So sensing danger requires intelligence? Bacteria can sense danger.
> navigate around obstacles it's never seen before
Not intelligence, but dexterity. Only if it has to solve a puzzle does intelligence come into play. And dogs suck ass at solving puzzles. Some birds are somewhat decent at it, but still very far removed from what an LLM can do.
> communicate with other humans through barking
Yeah, Timmy fell down a well, right? Perfect example of 'intelligence' and something you'd prefer a dog over an LLM /s
> I can't tell if you're trolling at this point. Llms are also trained and therefore are based on repetition and conditioning.
That is a fair point, but remember that your training examples were "sniffing for drugs" and "being a guide dog", both of which are very much in-distribution training (guide dogs only do a very specific very small set of things and require a lot of training to even be able to do those).
But for the sake of argument, let's say that there are some tasks requiring intelligence where you would prefer a dog over an LLM. Answer me this: Roughly what percentage of distinct tasks requiring intelligence would you prefer to have a dog over an LLM? For each task, imagine that failure to complete the task will cause serious harm to your loved ones, so the stakes are high.
I'm convinced that people that keep (uninjured) birds in cages are narcissistic sociopaths. This is based on the conversations that I've had with them about it. Life's too short to deal with people like that. I'm thankful for the indicator to avoid them, but I'm sad that it's at the expense of a bird.
I buy a couple of pinewood storage crates for them to play in and destroy every month. I also spend over half an hour every morning cleaning all their food and water containers, and cooking them breakfast (sweet potato, corn, fresh apple, assorted greens), I don't even make myself breakfast!