‘Bird-brained’ marketing strategies

Walking into a famous shopping mall in Lahore, you see two cockatoos and a macaw tethered at the entrance of a grocery store. The idea is to attract customers and provide entertainment to children nagging harassed-looking parents. It is tempting to imagine a reversal of roles. What if some day our feathered ‘entertainers’ open a mall in a posh locale and chain two humans to entertain their customers? Baby birds could buy ‘human-food’ in shiny packages and force-feed it to the hapless humans who have no choice but to swallow whatever is shoved down their throats. Flocks of chirping and cawing birds would rush to stare at them — resorting to the occasional poke in the rear to get their attention. As shock would give way to fear, the birds would gesture excitedly and burst into raucous laughter at the silly humans.

What if a ‘safety-conscious’ macaw tried to remove the humans’ fingernails so they wouldn’t pose a threat to the birds that tried to play with them? The occasional parent would stop its baby birds from getting too close to the cages. “What if the humans bit their heads off?” Though they would have never heard of any death-by-domesticated-human incidents, but hey, you gotta watch out for the kids, right?

Do we really need to think twice about our behaviour towards animals? Do we care how discouraging their flight can affect birds or limit their space? How fair is it to train a bird according to your convenience and force it to do things that are not part of its nature?

If we are forced to limit our movements to prevent us from running away, it will create a lot of physical complications for us. And if, luckily, we manage to escape from such oppression, the possibilities are that we will never be able to fit in human society.

In a planet where illegal immigrants end up getting killed by governments, it’s very difficult to imagine that a good life can be provided for animals. This idea reminds me of a Ugandan child brought up by monkeys, who was known as ‘monkey-boy’, and later, John Ssebunya. He was rescued and trained by a Ugandan farmer and was given immense coverage by Animal Planet.

For a country where a basic animal rescue service is not available and you don’t know what to do with dogs dying on the streets, caring about domesticated animals is perhaps asking for too much.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 28^th, 2015.