Posted by DiffTheEnder 8 hours ago
The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.
> "I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off."
If your audience conceived it as possibly being a merely repeated phrase that the researcher probably said thousands of times, not something the parrot actually understood, then it is very easy to brush off as something we already knew parrots could do.
Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.
Maybe they never try to cross roads?
In the mountains around Trondheim, Norway, you run into free range chicken farms (and sheep roaming the mountain top). Signs warn you that chickens are about and I think them getting hit is a real concern if you are maximizing chicken freedom.
That said, these aren't busy roads. The more traffic, the more barriers to keep the animals from getting hit.
https://thehumaneleague.org/article/are-chickens-smart https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5306232/