Brian Brett pens memoir about his pet African grey parrot Tuco

To get their pet African grey parrot to give them some peace while watching movies, West Coast author Brian Brett and his wife would share some of their popcorn with the bird.

Tuco the parrot would often fling the popcorn around in his cage and one day, one of the pieces he'd flung out was chomped up by Brett's dog.

"You could just see the look in Tuco's eyes, suddenly thinking, 'I could use this'," Brett told North by Northwest host Sheryl MacKay.

Brett watched as Tuco kept throwing out popcorn, until the dog was directly underneath his cage "and then whipped around and shat on him, right between the eyes.

"With Tuco I'm always one step behind. By the time I realized what he's doing, he's done it," Brett laughed in discussing his latest book,Tuco: The Parrot, the Others, and a Scattershot World.

The anecdote which, though funny, also points to the incredible intelligence of African grey parrots is one of many in the book.

They include Tuco scooping up spoons and other utensils and dive-bombing Brett's unsuspecting cats.

Brett, an author, poet and farmer based on Salt Spring Island,delves intohis 25-year relationship with the parrot to reflect on the relationships between humans and birds, humankind's ideas of language and intelligence, and our tendency to "other" anything that is different from us.

'I was othered'

"[It's] a journey back into my childhood and life with birds. When you're born strange, you see the strangeness of the world," Brett said, reading from a blurb he wrote for the book.

"Learning the story of the treatment of parrots took me back to my bullied childhood, especially in the sixties. I was born androgyne. A little bit male, and a little bit female. More importantly, I was othered, or treated as an outsider because I was different."

Emotional intelligence

Brett said that his own androgyny made him develop a sensitivity to the moods and emotions of others which makes him relate to Tuco.

"He has an amazing cultural understanding, he lives by empathy," said Brett.

"His intelligence is emotional. If somebody is telling a story, he will listen to the story and if its a joke he will actually be the first to laugh. He'll be forty feet away and when the punch line is delivered he knows the exact moment to laugh. That's because he's listening to the tone and he's actually sensing the relationship of us, the people in the house."

Brett, who has written about his life in his previous award-winning books Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life, and Uproar's Your Only Music, felt he needed to tell the story of Tuco, and the implications the animal has for world and society as a whole.

"What I predicate in Tuco is that we need to learn empathy. And that will be our way of dealing with the fact that we other so much of the world. This is, I think, a very evident symptom in the United States going on right now, and the Republicans are ignorant of the world, and they other it, and so the solutions are quite ludicrous," he said.

"The solution is for us to change culturally, for us to learn empathy, because if you have empathy you can't do that kind of stuff."

To hear the full interview listen to the audio labelled: Author Brian Brett explores empathy and what it means to be different in new book about Tuco, his African grey parrot.