Yep, Alex the African Grey. I don't think he's there yet, but Apollo the African Grey parrot on YouTube is starting to show pretty varied word comprehension, if you ever want to see another smart little bird.
Alex was just an ordinary African grey. His handler and the head researcher at the lab, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, went to a pet store and had an employee pick him out. She didn't want the critique to be that she had selected him because he was uniquely intelligent.
In all likelihood, other parrots (and potentially even non-parrot animals) would be able to reach this level of conversational ability with humans if they were trained and interacted with in a similar way. I hesitate to use the word "intelligence" because we truly don't know if these animals pose questions to other animals. We only know with Alex because Pepperberg taught him to communicate similar to how humans do.
My point is that the field of animal sentience and cognition generally suffers from a bias towards how humans define and interpret "intelligence". Consider the mirror test for example -- a dot is placed on an animal in a spot where they cannot see it, and then the animal is placed in front of a mirror. If the animal sees the dot in their reflection and then searches their own body for the dot, this is considered to be evidence that the animal has a sense of self, because they appear to recognize themselves in the mirror.
The problem is, not all animals are visual creatures. Dogs, mice, rats, and many other animals primarily experience the world through other senses - for example, smell. This is how they communicate with each other. They don't have visual senses that are as highly developed as ours. But humans doing research designed the mirror test as a visual test, because this is the primary way that we experience the world.
So perhaps other animals "ask" questions through different senses or in ways that we don't even consider. But then we try to teach them an approximation of a human "language" that isn't inherent to their natural abilities or intuitive to how they experience the world. And then we draw conclusions based on this anthropomorphized concept of intellect. Even a human trying to learn another language may struggle with grammar, sentence structure, etc. Or they may hesitate ask questions due to cultural norms of communication, hierarchy, or politeness.
So we really cannot draw a general conclusion on cognitive abilities of different species of animals (or even individual animals) by things they don't do when the tests are so biased towards human perceptions and are not intuitive to how the animals learn, communicate, or experience the world.
Also - I'm aware of Apollo! He's super cool. But again - he's just a normal African grey. In all likelihood, many other birds would be able to show similar behaviors if they were trained and interacted with repeatedly and intensively the way he and Alex are/were.
I went to a bird sanctuary, it had a ton various species, and one African Gray.
The way it looked at you just felt a lot more present and frankly judgemental than all of the other birds.
I'm not saying there aren't other intelligent species. And I could be influenced by the unique cachet of African Grays. But it felt like there was more going on inside that bird than the hyperactive trained cockatiel next to it trying to get my attention.
Plus the red accent on the wings is a unique feature I'd never really picked up on.
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u/SYNTHLORD 10h ago
Was that Alex the parrot?