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Irene Pepperberg wants to banish bored birds from cages across the land. And she hopes to take a page from the human amusement manual by building a customized Internet browser for an African gray parrot named Wart. Could this be a boon for the $23 billion pet industry?
A visiting professor of animal behavior at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Pepperberg has studied parrots for decades. She estimates more than 8 million of these highly intelligent birds live in the U.S. alone -- many of them literally bored to self-destruction.
"They are like children. They need interaction," says Pepperberg. "But they're left at home for eight or nine hours a day by their owners in impoverished environments. That results in some strange behavior. Some chew their wings, others chew their feathers. It's not very healthy."
Unlike most parrot lovers, Pepperberg is in a unique position to do something about this trauma. Along with a lab researcher and another MIT professor, this year she launched the the Interpet Explorer Project, with a goal of eventually teaching 20-month old Wart to surf the Net using a modified Web browser. In research first reported in New Scientist last week, scientists intend to teach Wart to manipulate a joystick with his claws and beak.
BABY STEPS.
Sounds crazy? Maybe not. The MIT team thinks parrots have what it takes to hit the Web. "On the tests we have given them, they have performed as well as chimps or dolphins. For their body weight, these birds have really large brains," says Pepperberg, who has taught another African gray parrot to understand 50 "labels," including colors, shapes, and types of food.
Currently, Wart's Web interface consists of a four-position joystick and simple console in a Lucite box connected to a modified Web browser. The joystick and console allow Wart (actually, his real name is Arthur) to choose screen wallpaper or tunes from a jukebox. These baby steps, says Pepperberg, are part of teaching Wart that he can change his environment with the controller "once he has learned to interface with any software we develop," she says.
Whether Wart decides to surf the Web is entirely up to him -- the scientists show him how to use the browser but they offer no Pavlovian inducements. Rather, the project hopes to determine if birds gain intrinsic rewards of interaction and entertainment like their human counterparts. The experiments are still too preliminary for any scientific conclusions, and Wart is far from proficient at Web browsing.
WIRED CAGE.
But should Wart learn to surf, Pepperberg envisions a new world where intelligent pets can escape their mental confinement and interact in new ways with both their owners and the outside world. "We could give these birds access to videotapes of parrots in the wild. Or they could access videostreams of their owners while they're at work. Or, in my wildest imagination, we might be able to develop some kinds of videogames for them," says Pepperberg, who cautions that the business-to-pets e-commerce sector remains highly speculative.
Speculative or not, Interpet could spark pet e-tailers' dreams of attaining a direct channel to their primary market -- the animals themselves. "We would find out what sites the parrot likes and try to go in and do banner ads that appeal to parrots. And we would encourage people to surf the Internet with their pets, so that the pets could learn to do it on their own," laughs Josie Welling, the director of brand marketing for San Francisco-based e-commerce site Petopia.com.
Indeed, Petopia already claims -- seriously -- that its marketing campaigns, with images of parrots gnawing on enormous crackers and cats lapping milk from big lakes, do create images recognizable to pets.
Next question -- will FedEx accept clawprints for signatures on shipments of sunflower seeds ordered by a feathered customer?
Copyright 2000, Bloomberg L.P.
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