Anyone who has ever kept any of the various parrots knows how emotional they can be, and how adept they are at infuriating people they don’t like. (I had one that used to bite me — hard — if he didn’t like my visitors.)
If this story is correct (and I have no reason to doubt it), a cockatoo became a highly partisan warrior in a bitter “bitch fight.” The headline is “Fowl language has woman flippin’ mad“:
An alleged cussing cockatoo is at the center of a heated neighborly dispute in which a Rhode Island woman is accused of training her bird to spew nasty expletives at her ex-husband and his girlfriend.
The foul-mouthed bird’s banter has become so bad the neighbors say they are leaving their waterfront home.
“I have never dealt with anything like this cuckoo bird next door,” Kathleen Melker, 53, told the Herald — and she wasn’t talking about Willy the cockatoo.
Lynne Taylor is due back in Warwick Municipal Court next week to fight allegations she violated a city animal noise ordinance when, according to Melker and boyfriend Craig Fontaine, she taught the bird to continually hurl curse words at them.
The thing about psittacines is that they crave attention, and they really don’t mind if they get it by annoying or irritating people. They talk because it gets attention, and they zero in on highly charged or emotional language, which is why they tend to curse, or issue otherwise embarrassing utterances. They have been known to make orgasm sounds, and there was a famous story of a tell tale parrot that exposed a cheating girlfriend’s affair.
Anyway, it seems the neighbor’s cat has even become involved in the latest skirmish, even to the point of being the subject of a restraining order:
Judges in superior and family courts have handed out restraining orders to people on both sides, even banning Melker’s cat, Pharaoh, from stepping onto Taylor’s property, said her lawyer, Stephen Peltier.
“The statute reads if an individual is annoyed, that becomes a public nuisance. That is broad based on case law,” Peltier said of the ordinance, adding his client denies teaching Willy such language. The bird instead is saying “knock it off,” words Fontaine himself taught it, Peltier said.
My friend who emailed me the link to this story said his money was on the cat, because he could swallow the squawking bird.
But as I pointed out, a cockatoo can be a match for a cat.