My dog Jennie sure knows how to boss us around and she doesn’t use English. There are some pets that speak a little English. Members of the parrot family can succeed pretty well.

We have a niece who has a pet macaw that’s twelve years old and speaks a few words. It knows what it wants and asks for it. One of the things it likes is to play with my niece on the bed. It will say “Up-up!” so it will be taken up to the bedroom. It actually giggles with delight as it is played with. When it wants a cracker it just asks for it.

Having a long tail, it can look as much as three feet long. Most of its body is small but is covered with many long feathers. Brilliant colors cover its body in reds, greens and blues making it beautiful to look at. It spends most of its life in a cage. Its ancestors still are members of great flocks in the tropics where they mate for life. Large macaws have been known to live past eighty.

As a member of the family with parrots it did have a relative in the United States by the name of the North Carolina parrot, but it became extinct in the early 1900s. Farmers helped it toward extinction because it would pick fruit before it ripened and toss it on the ground just for the fun of it.

The gray parrot, which is smaller than the macaw at only about nine inches tall, is the type that was the pet of many a sailor. It often could speak many words, some good and some bad. They speak in a loud coarse voice.

The little parakeet is the smallest member of the family. Our youngest daughter had a pet parakeet that would escape its cage on occasions much to the dismay of my wife.

I have seen a pet ordinary crow that could almost talk if you had a little imagination.

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