Polly Says What?! Should Parrots Testify at Murder Trials?

Bird scientists are skeptical whether Bud, an African grey parrot who allegedly witnessed a murder in 2015 in Michigan, can give reliable testimony or spoken evidence at a court trial. That's not because African grey parrots aren't intelligent — the birds can be trained to do simple math, speak with enormous vocabularies and demonstrate impressive inferential reasoning. Rather, it's unclear whether Bud is repeating a conversation from the murder itself, or whether he heard it on TV, the ra