You sent these youtube videos to your mailing list, claiming this is evidence of “intelligence”. These are simple (albeit well-done) classical conditioning and do not show any signs of true intelligence, this is stimulus-response and rehersed. Tricks aren’t the same as being intelligent. These birds are not demonstrating the same responses that you see from birds that are trained in cognitive speech like Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s birds. That grey, for example, does not realize what a “pig” is when she is making those sounds (it’s unlikely she has any understanding of what any of the vocalizations mean to humans) and there is very little actual intelligence going on here at all.

I actually think its a bit of a shame that people knowingly do this, these birds evolved the ability to make specific vocalizations in order to communicate with their flock, but it misleads people in two sepearte paths: some people do actually mistake circus tricks for intelligence, while some people do see this for what it is, pure mimcry. Unfortumately with the 2nd group, they tend to also overgenerize to the point that they believe that all talking birds are purley mimicing sounds with no comprehension of meanings associated.

Both of those videos have been on youtube for ages, I don’t think this was worthy of a group email.