#I’m sorry but I genuinely do think the majority of able-bodied and neurotypical people just hate us

[silvermoon424]

Love to see a thread full of blatant ableism on a supposedly progressive subreddit. Redditors try not to be garbage human beings challenge (IMPOSSIBLE DIFFICULTY).

Like, I guess disabled and neurodivergent people are irrational and selfish for asking for society to accommodate us. The ADA should have never been passed and disabled folks should just shut up and stop bothering able-bodied neurotypicals.

[theramseyloft]

Please don't compare autistic people to animals. It's super not cool.

I’m assuming you’re referring to this quote from the ask about pigeons and parrots.

“And if your mom is prepared for that and able to deal with what amounts to an autistic 5 year old with wings who can scream literally as loud as a jet taking off and bite through a broom handle for the next 60-80 years, then awesome!More parrots deserve a home that’s actually prepared for them!”

And I am sorry if that was offensive to any one. Another friend pointed out that it might be, so I went back and made the following edit to the post, immediately following the paragraph above.

“(Before any one gets concerned, I am autistic! I do not describe parrots this way as an insult. The similarities are just glaring to me, and if the thought of living with an autistic human child is upsetting, you should really rethink getting a parrot.)”

I stated at the beginning of the post that I’m not good with words either. 

Writing is the way I communicate most eloquently. I literally can’t talk like this vocally, unless I’ve spent HOURS practicing.

If I don’t mean any harm by it, I often can’t see how it could be hurtful, and I depend on more socially adept followers and friends to take me aside and point things out when I miss them.

I did not make the comparison for shock value or to degrade any one.

I am autistic. 

The similarities are genuinely glaring, to me.

I see myself and other people like me in every complaint I have ever heard some one make when they got rid of a parrot.

“It’s too loud!” “It destroys EVERYTHING!” “It won’t let me cuddle when *I* want to!” “It won’t stop plucking!” “I’m scared of it.” “It’s food/toys/housing/care/ is too expensive!”

All leads to:

“I don’t want it anymore!”

Parrots are BRILLIANT! 

Not only are they incredible mimics, but they are amazingly mechanically adept! They LOVE puzzles and climbing and they need TONS of time and mental stimulation! Space to play and forage! Toys they can destroy with out getting hurt. The company of some one that understands their needs and their behaviors.

They are adapted to live in HUGE flocks! Screeching that carries for miles keeps them in contact with each other.

Screeching is not bad behavior for a parrot. It’s just calling out to see if some one will answer. Cockatoos especially genuinely NEED loud, excited time!

Humans that vocally stim are not misbehaving. They NEED to make noise to express emotion.

Expecting a parrot or the humans who need to vocally stim to keep silent all the time is TERRIBLE for their mental health! It stresses both unspeakably to bottle that up, especially if they are loud because they’re happy or excited!

Loud time is necessary, and people who think they want a parrot have to be ok with and prepared for that. 

Parrot’s thick, powerful beaks are designed to cut, crush, and splinter.They eat hard nuts, tough fruits, and many species chew through wood to make nest holes. They even use their beaks as an extra hand to climb.

They are not being bad when they bite.

They don’t usually mean to bite hard. But human hands are fragile, and biting hard enough to hurt is really easy to do by accident.

I accidentally put one of my elementary school teachers in the hospital by running up and hugging her as tight as I could. 

I didn’t mean to hurt her. I was just SO overwhelmingly happy to see her, and it didn’t dawn on me that I even could have.

People who think they want a parrot need to be prepared for the fact that they don’t innately know how hard is too hard, or that they can hurt their handler without meaning to.

Scared, cornered parrots can inflict a LOT of damage attempting to defend themselves or their eggs from The Scary Thing!

They aren’t being bad when they do that either.

It’s usually a misunderstanding. 

Bird warning signs are just not intuitive to humans, and when we want to touch a pet, we tend to insist the pet be ok with that when ever we want them to be with little to no regard for its comfort.

You guys have NO idea how afraid I was of the neurotypical kids who seemed to go out of their way to harass me, bully me, and kill or destroy things I liked because my behavior was not normal.

They’d be friendly one second and hateful the next, from my perspective, and not knowing what to expect made me skittish and defensive and withdrawn.

People that think they want a parrot need to be prepared to learn to understand enough of its behavior to know when it’s receptive to interaction and when it’s overstimulated pr afraid and needs its boundaries to be respected.

You also need to understand that all parrots tamed by imprinting are at least some degree of mentally ill.

Mental illness and neurotype are not the same thing.

There is nothing wrong with an autistic person. We are healthy people whose brains process and store and retrieve information differently from what is more common and thus considered typical.

Mental illness is usually caused by physical or emotional trauma or neglect.

Let’s start with the fact that the vast majority of parrots do not get to live their lives as parrots.

They are removed from their parents and raised by humans, which is, let me remind you, genuinely necessary for them to be safe to handle in captivity.

Imprinting, as stated in the post, does not just make an animal think you are its mother. 

A birds entire species identity is conveyed through imprinting. “This is what you are, this is your social structure, these are your normal behaviors, this is what you eat, how you live, what you should be sexually attracted to.”

Parrots raised by humans think that they are human because that’s what imprinting does.But all of its instinctual urges will be parrot, and they will not match the thing it has imprinted on, which leads to a LOT of the miscomunication that stresses the bird and overwhelms the owner.

Humans don’t imprint, but I can tell you from experience that there is a disconnect between the way neurotypical and autistic humans think and process and interact with the world just drastic enough that it makes it hard to communicate effectively, despite being the same species and speaking the same language.

It’s incredibly frustrating, and with out any indication that the other can understand you, you just... give up and withdraw. 

People who think they want a parrot need to understand that a withdrawn bird doesn’t hate them and isn’t being bad. Its attempts to communicate have failed and it has given up.

An understanding of psitticine body language will go a LONG way to prevent this issue.

Most pet parrots live functionally alone and spend most of their time confined to their cage. They may never see another bird of their species, or even another bird, period, in their lives.

Look at most parrot cages on the market and the species they are marketed as suitable for.Most parrot cages are just display stands, barely large enough for the bird to stretch its wings out all the way, never mind flying or climbing or engaging in any natural behaviours!

And keep in mind that these are wild animals, less than ten generations into domestication.

Adapting to confinement takes GENERATIONS of selective breeding, and all ethics aside, parrots just haven’t had the TIME!

An intelligent, intensely social animal used to traveling great distances, spending a lot of time foraging and relying on chewing to get almost every comfort met from food to nests will hallucinate, pace, tear up its enclosure, lash out at its handlers, and eventually self mutilate when deprived of all social interaction, mental stimulation, physical activity, and behavioral outlets necessary to reduce stress.

Sound familiar?

Parrots don’t get to choose who they live with. Autistic humans don't get to choose who they are born to or who becomes their care taker. And the consequances of willingly or accidentally failing to meet their needs are STRIKINGKLY similar.

I am sorry if that is offensive.

I was not drawing attention to these parallels to say “Parrots are terrible because they are like autistic people!” 

I am pointing them out as food for thought to remind people to respect that their needs are complex, not especially intuitive to the typical joe, and if you want one, you need to be prepared to spend the next 60-80 years doing your best to keep the commitment you made to meet them all.

[anautisticdragon-blog]

“It’s ‘im wot did it officer, that bluddy dragon!”

An Autistic Dragon?

It's interesting, innit? Why an autistic dragon? I wanted to write a post about the title of my blog for... a good many reasons. Catharsis is amongst them, I felt like writing something very personal about myself, and it's a little apropos of kerfuffly doings of late. Drama, dogma, & dragons. What have I learned? I can't say that neurotypicals make for particularly convincing dragons, that's for certain. I believed that one area where I might be able to bond with an NT is over dragons, so that's where I began to look for one that might be possessed of a wee bit more self awareness than I'm used to witnessing from NTs. What it did was help to solidify my emotional connection with dragons, and to add further detail to those thoughts. Why is a dragon a dragon? Why do dragons do what dragons do? Why are NTs drawn to them for all the wrong reasons? And is that what gave rise to the ridiculous parody of dragons in contemporary NT-focused media? These are fun questions! Invigorating, even. I want to talk about them! I like questions! I'm not even going to draw your own conclusions for you, either. I just want to ask more questions. So why does a dragon, dragon? In other words, why does a dragon do the things it does? So let's look at that, eh? Can we say that dragons, in general, are closer to us on the sapience scale than the majority of animals? If so, why would such a creature spend their life hiding in a cave? You see, if the dragon was an NT I'm quite certain they'd be attending balls and haute couture shindigs. They're not, though, are they? The dragon is portrayed as being uncertain around humans, unsure, and perhaps even a little afraid despite their immense power. Can we blame them? How many dragons have had to put up with a bunch of scruffy brigands bursting into their lair and attempting to kill them for their hoard under the manufactured pretence of heroism? Humans are greedy, after all. So if a dragon claims possession over desirable shiny wot them rich people might like, well, it's only fair to spread some rumours about the dragon's villainy, eh? The dragon isn't like 'us,' you see, so the people aren't going to bother questioning these rumours, it's more than likely true that the dragon is doing these things "Right bluddy suspect if you ask me, 'iding owt int' cave up there. I mean, woss 'e up to then, eh? Plannin' our bloomin' demise if you ask me! I says we kill 'em 'fore 'e kills us!" Now replace dragon with Muslims. If you're especially alt-right inclined and you believe in white genocide, then you'll want to be replacing dragon with Jews. Yeah. An NT dragon is sort of like an honest politician. It may actually exist, but it's so rare that the chances of us ever finding one are so improbable that we might as well deem it statistically impossible. You see, even if they experience prejudice, people on the neurotypical spectrum tend to turn around and hate other people just as much. Trans-exclusionary feminists, gay people turning against transgender people, et cetera. And when they haven't even experienced a whit of prejudice? Not a modicum? Not even a tiny, wee amount? That's what brings about the alt-right. You see, the fellow who fancied himself as a dragon was like that. Straight, white, cis-gendered, of able body and mind, quite well off, and without a care in the world. This sorry bastard genuinely believes that the pushback against his own prejudices against the 'lesser tribes' is a prejudice in and of itself. He actually believes he's experienced prejudice. I had to have a bit of a giggle. When I asked this fellow what he liked about dragons? It was that they were powerful, of course. An apex predator. It's funny because that's not really what dragons are, are they? Often, they're brought low by a group of four humans in silly attire, as they have so little fight left in them. I think that dragons are as tired of a world so chock-full of parasites as I am. It's easy to just give up. I wouldn't be surprised if that's how every NT views dragons. It explains how we went from Dragonheart and Flight of Dragons to Skyrim and Game of Thrones, doesn't it? And the less they're able to be articulate, soft spoken, and empathetic the better. Why else amputate a dragon's forelegs? Remove her hands and she can't emote any longer, easier to portray her as an engine of sheer destruction then. I think that's why we have this ridiculous parody of dragons now, right? In Skyrim, Game of Thrones, and others. It's because of this perception of dragons that NTs have, that they're only appreciated for their power. Initially, religion had the NTs hate dragons as instruments of the devil so the niche of non-NT spectrum people who enjoyed them didn't have to worry, but as religion wanes they're entering into the NT consciousness. S'funny really because the Celtic peoples (hello, I'm from Cymru!) loved dragons. They believed that they were innately lovely, wonderful, and kind. Until Christianity twisted that. Not 'us' you see. So dragons continue to be altered to be more applicable to what the NT crowd wants of them, either as allies or as enemies. Dragons are creatures of power; Alien, cold, and vile. That's what the NT acquaintance liked about them, and what he thought was worth emulating. That's not a dragon, silly. That's another toxic construct of the 'alpha' philosophy. I'm 'an' autistic dragon as I'm sure there are other otherkin out there who're not on the neurotypical spectrum who'd be fully as able as I to be at least a little bit authentically dragon, as they'd understand what makes for a dragon. A dragon is a non-human being, old as the hills, and as wise as so much time has allowed them to be. They're gentle, kind, thoughtful, and poetic, but also tragic in how they're demonised just for being different. Because seriously, for every group of adventurers that bursts into their lairs with claims of wrongdoing, I'd want to see the bloody evidence. These fantasy worlds need police departments. I would be a dragon detective! I want to write a series of stories about being a 'Fantastic Crimes Division' detective now, the kind of person who investigates the kinds of things that people claim dragons do. God damn I want this to exist. What was I talking about? Oh. Right. Neurotypicals aren't convincing dragons as they're effectively the antithesis thereof. Their mindset is contrary to what a dragon is, after all. That's why I'm going to stick to autistic otherkin from now on, they get it. An autistic dragon because I've never seen an NT one.