Happily, Pepperberg has two other African Greys, called Griffin and Arthur, left to continue her work. They are younger than Alex and at a less advanced stage in their cognitive development, but she is hopeful that with training they will scale the heights of their predecessor.
Alex's death, as the debate it has prompted on blogs indicates, touches on a number of difficult subjects: the suspect Cartesian differentiation of the world into thinking humans and dumb animals; the argument over where mimicry ends and independent thought begins; the question of whether caging birds for experimentation is legitimate; the contention that teaching animals language is both demeaning and pointless - animals are animals, not ersatz humans; and the degree to which tender American sensibilities should be subjected to verbatim quotations from the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.
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