Ah, swearing. It’s a natural thing to do if things aren’t going your way, but it can also definitely be seen as rude or inappropriate.
After all, almost all (young) children aren’t allowed to swear by their parents, and a lot of foul-mouth words and phrases end up getting banned by mom and dad hoping that their kids won’t say or repeat them.
Of course, you can always discipline kids who keep on swearing, but it turns out that kids aren’t the only ones who need to listen.
A group of five parrots were recently removed from the public enclosure at a wildlife park in the UK for a simple reason: they couldn’t stop swearing at all the visitors.
It sounds totally made up and unreal, but it was a very real thing and the wildlife park staff had no other option but to keep these birds away from the public for a while.
It was a group of five friends who constantly swore at cussed at not only each other but anyone who approached them as well. As the only animal in the world that can mimic the human voice, they certainly did a good job at it – although their choice of vocabulary was less than ideal.
Steve Nichols, chief executive of the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park, said the following to CNN about the birds:
“It just went ballistic, they were all swearing,” he recalls. “We were a little concerned about the children.”
Steve even says that they cuss at him too.
“I get called a fat t**t every time I walk past,” he said.
The five culprits – Eric, Jade, Elsie, Tyson, and Billy – were all donated in the same week and seemed to get along together quite well.
The five African grey parrots actually had to spend some time together in a quarantining facility, and it seems like they picked up a few words and phrases from each other.
The park crew put them on display so the visitors could see them, but they had no idea about their bad verbal usage.
It didn’t take long before the staff noticed that these parrots had a particularly foul mouth.
“They literally, within a very short period of time, started swearing at each other,” Steve mentioned. “‘F**k off’ is the most common one,” he explained — “it’s a very easy one for them to learn” — but the birds would utter “anything you can think of.”
Some of the visitors even returned the swearing and cussing.
“The visitors were giving them as much back as what they were giving to them,” Steve laughed.
A lot of the park visitors actually found the five parrots amusing and hilarious, but the staff quickly thought about children who would hear bad words.
As of right now, the five African grey parrots are split up from each other, and they’ll have to retreat from the public areas of the park for a while. The shelter staff hopes that by keeping them apart for a while and letting them mimic other words, that their language will become more family-friendly.
“To take in a swearing parrot isn’t an unusual thing, it’s something that happens probably three or four times a year.”
However, because of the coronavirus pandemic, the wildlife park actually had a surge in donations of birds, which makes it easier for funny situations like these to occur.
“Every now and then you’ll get one that swears and it’s always funny. We always find it very comical when they do swear at you. But, just by coincidence, we took in five in the same week and because they were all quarantined together it meant that one room was just full of swearing birds. The more they swear the more you usually laugh which then triggers them to swear again,” Steve said to Lincolnshire Live.
Let’s hope that these foul-mouthed parrots have learned their lesson!
It actually isn’t the first time that a parrot from the wildlife park has gone viral on the internet, as Chico the parrot once performed a stunning rendition of Beyonce’s hit “If I were a boy”, which you can check out in the video below.
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
