Don't Be a Pirate

So, apparently it is not in the best interest of anyone to keep birds indoors.

This seems logical - birds are, after all, winged propagators of terror and chaos. Nothing gives me nightmares quite like the thought of an owl or eagle attacking my dogs... that’s mostly because I live in an area full of aggressive owls and eagles who like to attack small dogs and rip them apart with their mighty talons before regurgitating them in the open mouths of their hairless spawn. Or something like that. It’s all very upsetting.

Winged death-beasts aside, there are lots of reasons not to keep birds indoors. Reasons like the fact that, besides species of fowl (like chickens and maybe ducks), birds are wild animals who have not been bred to be kept in captivity. Their ideal environment is outdoors and, removed from that environment, they are generally stressed and unhappy.

Take feather-picking - a disfiguring, self-destructive behaviour which is incredibly common among birds in captivity, especially parrot species, and is unheard of in the wild. The causes are various - sexual frustration (as most captive birds don’t get to mate), lack of exercise, being kept in a small wire cage instead of the open jungle, having your wings clipped (which often triggers feather-picking)...these are a few of the struggles faced by birds kept inside our homes.

I learned this the hard way - after a particularly stress-prone lovebird stayed at my house for a grand total of forty-eight hours, which were the stressiest forty-eight hours I’ve endured so far in my present home. My life became a tormented hell-dimension full of squawking and bird poo. The bird felt similarly distressed, which caused more poo, and more squawks, and more death of my soul. And it wasn’t the lovebird's fault.

It was society’s fault. For allowing people to own and keep lovebirds at all. And, I suppose, it was my fault, for offering to take said lovebird home with me. And the bird’s owner, who was in the hospital. But mostly, I blame society.

Yes, parrots are pretty; so are pictures. Parrots can sometimes repeat things you've said in garbled, sing-song tones; so can a crappy tape recorder. And parrots can be affectionate...but they’re happier and healthier when they devote their affection to the other parrots of their flock - in the wild.

Animals do not exist solely for our amusement, people. And having a parrot that sits on your shoulder will only make you look like a sad, urban pirate.

Adieu.

A tribe of goats, a drift of sheep, and an ambush of llamas...I mean, herd.

We all know that it’s a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese, and a disturbing murder of crows. But did you know, for example, that a group of rhinoceroses is called a crash? Or that a group of mice or rats is called a mischief? Or that toads and frogs live in knots, although frogs also live in...armies?

Indeed.

Birds may have the most obscure and ridiculous groupings, be it a charm of hummingbirds and a parliament of owls, a flock of ostriches but a mob of emus, a convocation of eagles, a kettle of hawks, a siege of herons, a party of jays, a colony of gulls, a covey of grouse, a congress of ravens (otherwise known as an unkindness)...or a piteousness of doves.

Why, you ask? To enable the existence of crossword puzzles and obscure scrabble words? To thicken our dictionaries and cloud our minds with bizarre words that seem entirely made up but which spell-check insists are just fine? Also, did you know that a group of bears is a ‘sleuth,’ or ‘sloth’?

And why do multiple parrots form a company, while mongooses (alas, not mongeese) and ferrets form a business?

My favorite? Jellyfish. Which come in a smack.

Sadly, some adorable animals, including koalas, platypuses, and pandas, are all without group names (likely because koalas and pandas were previously classified as bears, and thus sloths, plus pandas never come in multiples...and who knows anything about platypuses, really. Oh, except that their babies are called puggles!).

In alignment with the spirit of existing classification, I therefore propose the following...

A group of koalas shall henceforth be known as a ‘barmitzvah.’

A group of platypuses shall be called an ‘ointment.’

A group of pandas shall be known as an ‘apocalypse.’

My work is done.

An ointment of puggles.