You can't tell when I'm not being entirely serious?

My best friend is clearly a cat, demands food with soulful looks, all places - especially with food, are alike to him.

I have never quite been sure of any creature that quite spoke to me, and I haven't gone looking for one in case I didn't like what I found.

Best match so far, Alex the parrot. I don't know if you have ever seen this redoubtable bird. He is the project of a woman who is researching whether parrots use language, or merely parrot. There was a BBC program in which she used plastic shapes of various primary colours to show that he gave the correct answer when askd for the shape or the colour (to ensure he was associating the correct ideas, thus language, rather than parroting). he did very well at this, so she moved to something harder, a corn-cob, asking the colour.

Alex: want corn
Scientist: when you tell me what the colour is. What colour?
Alex: want corn
...and so on, and on, the scientist getting very irritable as she is being filmed failing. The parrot managed the body language of a child who cannot answer, doesn't understand why the questioner keeps asking, and is descending into sulk, wings hunched, beak down. Eventually,...

Alex: I go away now (shuffling down to the other end of his perch) I go away now.

And that, my friend and I agreed, was the sign of a very intelligent bird. Apparently he is getting worse, very insistent on his own way. And rude when he doesn't get it.

I reckon that colour vision, especially of ripe fruit and veg., is important to parrots, and he thought it was another colour he hadn't been told the name of, instead of the yellow (plastic) the researcher thought it was.

Penny (alliterative nicknames not welcomed)