When a wildlife park in Lincolnshire, England, adopted five new parrots in August, few expected the birds to become the center of controversy. As Kate Ng writes for The Independent, however, it didn’t take long before they began causing some rather colorful problems.
Shortly after arriving, the birds “taught each other obscenities while quarantined together in the same room.” Steve Nichols, the park’s chief executive, explains that “the more they swear the more you usually laugh which then triggers them to swear again.”
The birds eventually picked up on the laughter as well, to the point that, when one of the birds would curse, the others would laugh and then repeat the process.
The workers found it amusing, but “within 20 minutes of being in the introductory we were told that they had sworn at a customer and for the next group of people, all sorts of obscenities came out.” While the customers mostly found the display amusing as well, the park decided it would be better to remove them.
The parrots now live in an “off-shore enclosure” with roughly 1,500 other parrots, though the five have been separated to hopefully mitigate further spread of their swearing.
Choosing our words carefully
Scripture warns that “the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire!” (James 3:5). Every parent can attest to the reality of that situation.
I have two small kids, and both reached an age sooner than I expected when I could count on hearing my own occasional verbal miscues coming back at me via the otherwise innocent sound of a child’s voice.
Those have not been my proudest moments as a father, but they have served as a strong reminder of why it’s so important that we choose our words carefully when speaking to or around others.
While we’re not all surrounded by impressionable young children, the manner in which we talk…
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