I had the experience (when invited to the wedding for the daughter of a physician I had worked with) of sitting next to Irene Pepperberg who raised Alex.
I enjoyed talking to her...and I recall asking her what it was like to live with such a creature for that period of time, and she said something to the effect of “it was like having a very aggressive, jealous and temperamental 14 year old child”.
I guess as a male parrot, he took to viewing her as “his”...:)
IIRC, she said when she was dating and brought a male guest to the house, Alex could be very difficult to deal with, as he was very possessive and jealous! (I’ll bet)
That was an interesting dinner.
She sat on one side, and on the other side was an astrophysicist from MIT. What really startled me was when I was talking to the astrophysicist, I was able to understand some of the technical aspects of what he was talking about because he used many of the same types of mathematical filters to manipulate images of very distant objects that I used to look at very close objects that were radioactive (Nuclear Medicine). Both distant astronomical objects with very little light making it to earth and organs in a patient with very little amounts of radioactivity needed to have certain filters applied to make the viewing of them meaningful.
That had never occurred to me before, that I would ever have something professionally in common with someone like an astrophysicist...:) Made me feel smaaaaaaht!
That is so exciting!