OK, so maybe he wasn't really arrested. But either way, Yosuke the parrot ended up in police custody earlier this month after being rescued from a rooftop near Tokyo. Doing his best stool pigeon impersonation, he didn't talk to the cops. Yosuke was eventually transferred to a nearby veterinary hospital, where he started talking to the vet that cared for him.

Interestingly enough, what he said was his full name—Yosuke Nakamura—and address. The vet checked up on the address and found that it was inhabited by the Nakamura family, which gladly welcomed him back home.

It's not much of a logical leap to assume that Yosuke feels emotions, has desires of his own, and has a meaningful investment in his happiness—as all animals do.

You can see CNN's full story about Yosuke here.

—Sean

Posted by Sean Conner, Laboratory Investigations Special Projects Coordinator

WildAboutTheWorld/Creative Commons

The famous African Grey Parrot named Alex died late last week at Brandeis University outside of Boston. Alex knew English well enough to identify over 50 different objects, seven colors and numerous shapes by name. He could also count and was able to express desires, including, get this, his frustration with the repetitive research.

It’s being said that Alex’s advanced language and recognition skills revolutionized the understanding of the avian brain. Alex taught many people that yes, even birds have thoughts and feelings and preferences, and the ability to express them. And while that’s all well and good, the important thing to me is what we, as a society, do with that knowledge. We can’t acknowledge it when it’s convenient by ooohing and ahhhing because a bird can say “I love you,” without also accepting the responsibility that comes along with knowing that these animals each have a very real cognitive presence.

There are millions of birds suffering and dying for KFC and dying in Petsmart’s back rooms, all of whom are thinking and feeling and experiencing the world just like Alex did. They just don’t know how to express themselves in a way that we can understand. And if there’s one thing that we should have learned from Alex, it’s that we need to be open and “listen” to animals, even when they’re not speaking our language, because there’s a whole lot more going on inside their heads than we give them credit for.

Check out this great New York Times column from Verlyn Klinkenborg for his take on Alex.

African Gray Prodigy, N'Kisi

His name is N'kisi, and he's been getting a whole lot of press lately in scientific circles because of his huge vocabulary and his unique sense of humor. Instead of mimicking things he's heard already, N'kisi goes right ahead and invents his own phrases to describe new ideas that he's introduced to, and he even rocks the past and future tenses when he's feeling fancy.

According to the BBC, N'kisi described perfume as "pretty smell medicine," and commented on pictures of Jane Goodall with the very reasonable question, "Got a chimp?" The BBC article also reports on N'kisi's sense of humor:

He appears to fancy himself as a humourist. When another parrot hung upside down from its perch, he commented: "You got to put this bird on the camera."

Kind of amazing.

On a slightly sadder (and perhaps inevitable) note, the story immediately made me think of the countless African Gray parrots like N'kisi who are sold in stores like PetSmart and destined to spend their incredibly long lives in captivity, without much stimulation beyond the occasional "Pretty Polly" comment through the cage bars. Which, well, is just really depressing. … Soooo, instead of ending this entry on such a depressing note, here's a completely unrelated video of a trapped deer being blown to safety by a helicopter. Hooray!