Side Tracked - Shut up you "wh___"

Side tracked. Looking back at all of the notes I have taken over the years I came across something that reminded me of a funny story.

We have a parrot. His name is Pepper. When our eldest was 17 her friends taught it to say “Shasta’s a whore”. Not funny, right?

One year we were going away for a week and I hired a very religious professional vet assistant to house sit and look after the animals. A couple of days into our holiday I get an email from her saying, Jill, your bird says shut up you whore.

I was horrified. OMG, she was a little off what the bird actually says but still, OMG. How do I respond. Well, I wrote her back and reassured her that although it sounds like that, I would never allow anyone to speak that way and that the bird was actually saying “Shut the door”.

Pepper was just a young bird when he learned to call Shasta names. We have since taught him to say shut the door and he has forgotten the other sentence or replace it with something more appropriate.