Alex & Me

I saw someone in my bird group mention they were reading about Alex. Nothing could have really prepared me for his story. I am new to the bird owner world, yet understand that they are very intelligent, especially grays.Have tissues at hand.

It's not often that we get to watch a sea change in scientific thought. Most of the big changes - like when we went from thinking the world was flat to round - happened quite a while ago. However, with this book, tracing over the thirty years in Alex's feathery life, we see how scientists moved from absolutely believing animals could NOT think or talk to coming around to entertain the possibility. That's a fairly substantial change.Alex, an African Grey Parrot, was a "normal" pet store parrot, not the product of genetic super-breeding. This typical average parrot was diligently trained by the researchers and within an amazingly short period of time he could identify colors, shapes, sizes, and count. The scientists were very careful to verify their findings, to make sure Alex was really doing what they thought he was. With the many other cases of fraud out there, the scientists wanted to make sure their research was beyond doubt, that it was not that they were leading or guiding Alex to the correct answers. He really did have the mental acuity to identify objects and describe what he saw.This may be something we think is fairly easy to agree with in modern times. After all, research with elephants, dolphins, chimps and gorillas have revealed some pretty amazing things about their thought processes. However, back when researcher Irene Pepperberg began, the scientific community thought she was completely insane to even think something like this. Shad to fight yearly for funding to keep her research going.While I enjoyed the Alex story greatly, I do think the book could have used some edited. The primary issue is that the first quarter of the book isn't even about Alex. It's about Irene and her background. While I agree that learning about the researcher is important in order to understand the overall story, this was a little much. I really didn't need to know the month by month details of how Ms. Pepperberg grew up. It would have been fine to summarize this more briefly and get to the main story about Alex.In a similar vein, the very beginning of this book was just a dump of email messages praising Alex. Since we hadn't even met the bird yet or have any emotional connection with him, it felt very forced. We had to read page after page after page of obituary and press release. This all would have done well at the END of the book when we actually had grown to know and love the fluff of feathers. Then we could have related and empathized with the moving tributes. To have them all piled at the beginning of the book, about a bird we hadn't even glimpsed yet, made no sense to me. That's the sort of stuff I wanted to read AFTER I'd read his entire story and felt the sadness of his death.Also, I realize this wasn't a scientific journal, but I would have liked to see a little more detail about how they were doing the research and less about the funding worries. It seemed like half of the story was angst about how to get funding X or Y or Z rather than learning about Alex and the techniques.So a great story in general, but for me it was too heavily weighed on "Ms. Pepperberg and her background and funding woes" and not enough on "Alex, the amazing creature, and why his life was important."

Alex & Me is an engaging narrative of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs revealed by Dr. Irene Pepperberg in her thirty year endeavor to understand communication and cognitive abilities with her research subject -Alex the African Grey Parrot.Much of the appeal of Alex & Me relates to the fascinating confluence of genius between the Doctor and her irascible, feathered subject. The two developed the rarest of bonds between human and animal. I found myself chuckling along with Dr. Pepperberg, astounded as fragments of Alex’s remarkable ‘personality’ were revealed in this story. To say that Alex was a unique would be a gross understatement. His remarkable capacity for learning and communication was rivaled only at times by his mischief-making. The narrative reveals many of the experiments Alex was subjected to over the course of his lifetime, but the main emphasis here is on the extraordinary relationship development between Dr. Pepperberg and her good friend Alex.It is fortunate for the world that Dr. Pepperberg recognized something unique and fascinating about birds in her childhood. Her curiosity and stalwart determination to pursue her research objectives gifted the world with undeniable, significant proof that human beings and primates aren’t the only animals capable of language on this planet. In fact, her research with Alex helped pave the way for the current scientific recognition of sentience in many other animal species.There are many take-aways in this wonderful book. The Alex studies helped to significantly deconstruct prevalent behaviorist notions that human beings are unique in the Animal Kingdom and therefore seperate from and superior to all other life forms in nature. The intellectual feats of Alex spanning three decades seem to reveal quite the opposite: human beings are not so unique in the realm of cognitive abilities or consciousness and are, like other animals, merely a part of natural order. Like any human being, Alex was unique in his own way and gifted with a distinguishable personality and abilities. The last words of Alex to Dr. Pepperberg were “I love you. You be good.”We love you too Alex. You may have flown over the rainbow bridge, but you will never be forgotten.

Tutti coloro che hanno un cenerino dovrebbero leggere questo libro

I read it in one sitting, could not put it down. For 22 years, I shared my home with a gregarious, loquacious galah. This story of Alex and Irene reduced me to tears.

Una splendida scoperta per chi nutre un enorme fascino verso le abilità cognitive riscontrabili in specie diverse da quella umana, ma che non ha avuto esperienze con uccelli e in particolare pappagalli. Ciò che si evince è quanto per noi il linguaggio sia essenziale per comprendere il pensiero altrui, quanto un pappagallo possa imparare ad usarlo per esprimere i propri bisogni, eppure quanto sia limitante se lo vediamo come unico canale per riconoscere un'altra intelligenza.

This book was engaging and enjoyable. My disappointment was that, after Alex die, Irene Pepperberg wrote that he was taken for an autopsy, but she didn't tell the reader what caused his death.

This book is a story for about 30 years of an author and the ohm.The ohm was considered to be the animal of the examination so that the ohm is able to talk about.A theme of the examinations is to say whether the bird has ability such as the monkey.In conclusion, the bird was able to distinguish a color and form, and add numbers, subtract numbers like a person.This book must impress the person whom there is keeping a bird as a pet.This book deals with a part of the ability of the bird.I introduce my experience.The King penguin can distinguish one's child by a sound from the group of about 200,000 child penguins.Furthermore, as for the dove, there is an experimental result understood in all parts of the music of Bach of 20 minutes.Except just few exceptions, the dove was able to recognize even the similar form of other composers.In addition, the migratory bird has ability to be beyond the summit of Mount Everest in a group.The bird understands that the communicative competence is more than a person.I was impressed by splendid ability of the animals which there was in the natural world.