I want a new...pet

Anyone who has spoken to me in the last, um, YEAR knows I want a dog. Like, REALLY bad. But unfortunately, Husband says no, not until we have a house with a yard and I guess I’m inclined to think he’s right. Also, at this point I don’t think Psycho Cat would be able to handle it, and since I love Psycho Cat (despite the fact that she attacked my hand last night and wouldn’t let go and I had to slather on the Neosporin and spray her with water to get her to stop), I don’t want to do anything to make her more disturbed than she already is.

So, we have been discussing another pet we could get that we could keep out of Smokey’s reach but would still be really fun to have. I am not picky…I love any critter provided it’s not a spider. Husband loves birds, so that was the logical conclusion. He had pet crows growing up (their names were Randall and Flagg, after a Stephen King bad guy) and he loved them. Since I don’t think we’ll be able to get crows (since the Federal Migratory Bird Act of 1918 prevents you from taking them from the wild anyway), we thought about other types of birds we could get. Parrots are too big, too noisy, too mean, and live FOREVER. Cockatoos, same thing. We kind of felt “meh” about parakeets and budgies, so we started doing research on myna birds.

We want a bird that is intelligent, that we can train, and that is big enough that we can take it out of the cage and walk around with it. We also want a bird that is ok living by itself (i.e. not with a mate or other birds to keep it company). Turns out that myna birds fit pretty well with all these requirements. They are very smart and can mimic most human sounds and develop vocabularies of more than 100 words. If you hand-raise them from babies, they are affectionate and will be happy to be out of their cage and cuddle with you. They are not too big, not too small (about 10 – 12 inches) and are very pretty as well. I did a substantial amount of research on the web and found that there is a breeder in Connecticut, and his contact info lists an (860) area code so he might be close by.

Last night we walked around the house for about a half hour trying to decide where we’d put a cage, and discussing how fun it would be to teach a bird phrases like “HA-ha” ala Nelson in The Simpsons, the Futurama – Dr. Zoidberg escape sound, and assorted other things we quote/say a lot. And if we kept our bird in the guest room, where my home office is located, it would be hilarious for me to be on a conference call or something and hear the bird bust out with the name of a drug class like “HIV-1 nucleoside and nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors” or something! LOL.

So what do people think? Does anyone own a myna bird, or know someone who owns one?