Read Pickles The Parrot Returns: My Continued Adventures with a Bird Brain for Free Online Page B

don't like
it when I toss your pork chop on the carpet.  The dog and
I don't mind eating off the floor, why should you?”
    “ I called my dog,
Neeka, over & asked him if he wanted to go for a
walk.  He just looked at me, being the chump he is, so I
climbed down from the cage and walked out of the room saying "Let's
go.  Let's go for a walk."  But when I turned around he
was still sitting there.  I came back and said "Doncha wanna
go for a walk?" but he didn't answer.  Then I
remembered.  He doesn't understand going for a walk cuz before
he came to live with us, mom always said that to me and she didn't
want him to learn it otherwise every time she would ask me to go
for a walk around the house, he would get excited and think he was
going outside.  So, I think we should come up with a term for
Neeka to understand going for a walk.  I suggested "Let's
go shove a stick up your nose! C'mon boy!  Let's go!" 
But I haven't noticed mom using that yet.”
    “ If you were forced to eat
dog food, it wouldn't be so bad.  Not unless the dog had
leprosy or something.”
    “ What about, instead of
mouse traps, we have dog traps?  Not to hurt them or anything,
but just to hold them down long enough to chew up their
toys.”
    “ I'm going to get a Seeing
Eye Skunk.  A Seeing Eye Dog would be okay but people would
really get out of the way for a Seeing Eye Skunk.”
    “ I tell mom or dad to
'tell me a story' and when they do, they put their lips up to my
ears and talk. I go into a daze from the vibrations and warmth
of their breath. I like the vibrations on my beak too so sometimes
I tell them 'talk to the beak'. My little dog Neeka is like that
too, he likes his ear talked to. Not by me though.”

Neeka and Pickles are quite the characters
together. While they don’t interact physically, they are very
attuned to each other. It’s really quite comical watching both dog
and bird when something scares one or the other. They both react to
each other’s frights and they’re both pretty darn sure that, even
though something didn’t initially scare one of them, the other must
know something that they don’t.
    When Neeka was a little pup, I brought home a
new ball for him to play with – one of those colorful, smaller
sized beach balls – and the moment he saw it in my hand, he was
leaping like a little kangaroo in his excitement to get at it. I
wasn’t thinking of the crazy colors on the ball as I threw it from
the kitchen doorway and into the livingroom. Neeka, in his frenzy
to go after it, made about half a dozen attempts to pursue it from
the kitchen tile, looking all the while like a cartoon dog running
a mile a minute in the same spot. The only thing missing was the
music of the beating tin drum in the background. He finally managed
to bolt after it but the scuffling, bolting and sudden appearance
of a large kaleidoscopic colored sphere appearing out of nowhere
almost gave Pickles a coronary.
    As Neeka ran after the ball, Pickles came
unhinged and flew screaming around the room causing Neeka to do an
about-face and run, terrorized, out of the room. I’m killing myself
laughing about it as I type this. I can’t help it; I’m the type of
person who laughs at serious accidents. I don’t mean to, it’s just
a knee-jerk reaction for me.
    I once watched a good friend get hit by a car
and I barely had the strength to help her off the ground from
laughing so hard. Don’t get me wrong, somewhere in the back of my
head, I was horrified and extremely concerned about her but I could
also tell that she wasn’t dead or anything since she was moving and
the car hadn’t been going all that fast. She was furious with me at
first but my laughing was contagious and soon she was laughing
through her tears, right along with me. She did have a sore hip
where she was struck and a couple of bruises and scrapes but I
think the laughter got her through the pain briefly – I’d like to
think so anyway.
    So, suddenly, here was