Alex died at age thirty in 2007, twenty years earlier than expected. She also conveys the long and at times lonely struggles she endures in her career, as an academic outside the mainstream, dependent on grant funding or a university brave enough to hire her. Pepperberg does a good job describing the experiments, conveying Alex's talents and personality. Because he could do things that no one thought a bird could do: develop a decent vocabulary, count, add, spell, reason, communicate, he became a bit of a media celebrity. He was a roguish and imperious bird, but awfully sweet. Alex and Me describes Alex in charming detail.
After some self-study, she embarked on a new career. in chemistry from MIT but fell out of love with it around the same time that she learned that serious science was being conducted on the topic of animal behavior and communication. Pepperberg, fell in love with birds as a lonely, shy, sad and silent little girl. The story of their thirty-year adventure is a landmark of scientific achievement and of an unforgettable human-animal bond.Īlex and Me tells the surprisingly moving story of a 30 year professional relationship, scientific experiment, and dare I say "friendship" between Alex the parrot and his owner, the author Irene Pepperberg.
Yet nearly every day, they each said, ‘I love you.’Īlex and Irene stayed together through thick and thin – despite sneers from experts, extraordinary financial sacrifices, and a nomadic existence from one university to another. He sometimes became bored by the repetition of his tests, and played jokes on her. He was jealous when she paid attention to other parrots, or even people. They shared a deep bond far beyond science. They were emotionally connected to one another. Yet there was a side to their relationship that never made the papers. The fame that resulted was extraordinary. Together, Alex and Irene uncovered a startling reality: We live in a world populated by thinking, conscious creatures. He understood concepts like bigger, smaller, more, fewer, and none. Yet, over the years, Alex proved many things. When Irene and Alex first met, birds were not believed to possess any potential for language, consciousness, or anything remotely comparable to human intelligence. Over the thirty years they had worked together, Alex and Irene had become famous - two pioneers who opened an unprecedented window into the hidden yet vast world of animal minds. What would normally be a quiet, very private event was, in Alex’s case, headline news. His last words to his owner, Irene Pepperberg, were ‘You be good.
On September 6, 2007, an African Grey parrot named Alex died prematurely at age thirty-one.
0 kommentar(er)
