Polly wanna stop cursing?
A British zoo has removed a group of parrots from public view because the birds kept letting the cuss words fly.The Lincolnshire Wildlife Park said they moved the five African gray parrots into aviaries away from public view after the nonstop profanity ruffled some feathers."Some visitors found it funny but with kids visiting at weekends, we decided to move them," park CEO Steve Nichols told BBC. "I'm hoping they learn different words within colonies — but if they teach the others bad language and I end up with 250 swearing birds, I don't know what we'll do."Watch TODAY All Day ! Get the best news, information and inspiration from TODAY, all day long.
The birds were adopted by the park from five different owners in August and then quarantined together before being put on public display.
Meet the exotic animals that call Brazil's rainforest home
“They were all (cursing) and blinding at each other, which was funny, but when they went outside they were quite offensive to some of the visitors," Nichols told the Lincolnshire Reporter. "It caused some concern as people didn’t realize it was the parrots at first, as it can sound like it is a person’s voice, but then they loved it."The British park also discovered that the patrons were giving it right back to the parrots like it was the dialogue of a Quentin Tarantino movie.INTERESTING FACT ABOUT YOUR PET: While other pets have positive effects on your health as well, dogs have the added benefit of needing to be walked and played with numerous times a day. This means most dog owners get the recommended minimum 30 minutes of exercise a day, lowering their risk of cardiovascular disease and keeping them in better overall shape.
"It is unusual to get five coming to us at once that all have the blue language with the ‘f word’ the most common," Nichols told the Lincolnshire Reporter. "We are finding that people are swearing to try and encourage the parrots."
Parrots can often sound like humans; in a case in Florida in January, police were called after someone thought they heard a woman screaming that turned out to be a parrot.And the parrots quickly picking up on the profanity is not a surprise. African gray parrots are the most popular type of pet bird in the world and are the greatest mimic of human speech among 350 known parrot species, according to National Geographic.