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The Candor and Lies of Nazi Officer Albert SpeerThe minister of armaments was happy to tell his captors about the war machine he had built. But it was a different story when he was asked about the HolocaustBy Gilbert KingSmithsonian.com | Smithsonian Magazine | Smithsonianimage: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/files/2013/01/Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1979-026-22_Adolf_Hitler_verleiht_Albert_Speer_Fritz-Todt-Ring.jpgAdolf Hitler and Albert Speer in 1943. Photo: WikipediaOn April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops fought toward the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in street-to-street combat, Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head and fired. Berlin quickly surrendered and World War II in Europe was effectively over. Yet Hitler’s chosen successor, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, decamped with others of the Nazi Party faithful to northern Germany and formed the Flensburg Government.As Allied troops and the U.N. War Crimes Commission closed in on Flensburg, one Nazi emerged as a man of particular interest: Albert Speer, the brilliant architect, minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich and a close friend to Hitler. Throughout World War II, Speer had directed an “armaments miracle,” doubling Hitler’s production orders and prolonging the German war effort while under relentless Allied air attacks. He did this through administrative genius and by exploiting millions of slave laborers who were starved and worked to death in his factories.Speer arrived in Flensburg aware that the Allies were targeting Nazi leaders for war-crimes trials. He—like many other Nazi Party members and SS officers—concluded that he could expect no mercy once captured. Unlike them, he did not commit suicide.The hunt for Albert Speer was unusual. The U.N. War Crimes Commission was determined to bring him to justice, but a U.S. government official hoped to reach the Nazi technocrat first. A former investment banker named Paul Nitze, who was then vice-chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, believed it was imperative to get to Speer. As the war in Europe was winding down, the Americans were hoping that strategic bombing in Japan could end the war in the Pacific. But in order to achieve that, they hoped to learn more about how Germany had maintained its war machine while withstanding heavy bombing. Thus Nitze needed Speer. In May 1945, the race was on to capture and interrogate one of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen.image: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/files/2013/01/a-500x349.jpgSpeer is arrested along with members of the Flensburg Government in May 1945. Photo: WikipediaJust after Hitler’s death, President Donitz and his cabinet took up residence at the Naval Academy at Murwik, overlooking the Flensburg Fjord. On his first evening in power, the new leader gave anationwideradio address; though he knew German forces could not resist Allied advances, he promised his people that Germany would continue to fight. He also appointed Speer his minister of industry and production.On May 15, American forces arrived in Flensburg and got to Speer first. Nitze arrived at Glucksburg Castle, where Speer was being held, along with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was also working for the Strategic Bombing Survey, and a team of interpreters and assistants. They interrogated Speer for seven straight days, during which he talked freely with the Americans, taking them through what he termed “bombing high school.” Each morning Speer, dressed in a suit, would pleasantly answer questions with what struck his questioners as remarkable candor—enough candor that Nitze and his associates dared not ask what Speer knew of the Holocaust, out of fear that his mood might change. Speer knew his best chance to survive was to cooperate and seem indispensable to the Americans, and his cooperation had a strange effect on his interrogators. One of them said he “evoked in us a sympathy of which we were all secretly ashamed.”He demonstrated an unparalleled understanding of the Nazi war machine. He told Nitze how he had reduced the influence of the military and the Nazi Party in decision-making, and how he had followed Henry Ford’s manufacturing principles to run the factories more efficiently. He told his interrogators why certain British and American air attacks had failed and why others had been effective. He explained how he’d traveled around Germany to urge his workers on in speeches he later termed “delusional,” because he already knew the war was lost.image: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/files/2013/01/469px-Nitze_Paul-391x500.jpgPaul Nitze of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey interrogated Speer in May 1945. Photo: WikipediaIn March 1945, he said, with the end in sight, Hitler had called for a “scorched earth” plan (his “Nero Decree”) to destroy any industrial facilities, supply depots, military equipment or infrastructure that might be valuable to advancing enemy forces. Speer said he was furious and disobeyed Hitler’s orders, transferring his loyalty from der Fuhrer to the German people and the future of the nation.After a week, Nitze received a message from a superior: “Paul, if you’ve got any further things you want to find out from Speer you’d better get him tomorrow.” The Americans were planning on arresting the former minister of armaments and war production, and he would no longer be available for interrogation. Nitze did have something else he wanted to find out from Speer: He wanted to know all about Hitler’s last days in the bunker, since Speer was among the last men to meet with him. According to Nitze, Speer “leaned over backwards” to help, pointing the Americans to where they could find records of his reports to Hitler—many of which were held in a safe in Munich. Nitze said Speer “gave us the keys to the safe and combination, and we sent somebody down to get these records.” But Speer was evasive, Nitze thought, and not credible when he claimed no knowledge of the Holocaust or war crimes against Jews laboring in his factories.“It became evident right away that Speer was worried he might be declared a war criminal,” Nitze later said. On May 23, British and American officials called for a meeting with Flensburg government cabinet members aboard the ship Patria and had them all arrested. Tanks rolled up to Glucksburg Castle, and heavily armed troops burst into Speer’s bedroom to take him away. “So now the end has come,” he said. “That’s good. It was all only kind of an opera anyway.”Nitze, Galbraith and the men from the bombing moved on. In September 1945, Speer was informed that he would be charged with war crimes and incarcerated pendingtrialat Nuremberg, along with more than 20 other surviving members of the Nazi high command. The series of military tribunals beginning in November 1945 were designed to show the world that the mass crimes against humanity by German leaders would not go unpunished.As films from concentration camps were shown as evidence, and as witnesses testified to the horrors they endured at the hands of the Nazis, Speer was observed to have tears in his eyes. When he took the stand, he insisted that he had no knowledge of the Holocaust, but the evidence of slave labor in his factories was damning. Speer apologized to the court and claimed responsibility for the slave labor, saying he should have known but did not. He was culpable, he said, but he insisted he had no knowledge of the crimes. Later, to show his credentials as a “good Nazi” and to distance himself from his co-defendants, Speer would claim that he’d planned to kill Hitler two years before by dropping a poison gas canister into an air intake in his bunker. On hearing that, the other defendants laughed in the courtroom.In the fall of 1946, most of the Nazi elites at Nuremberg were sentenced either to death or to life in prison. Speer received 20 years at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he was known as prisoner number 5. He read continuously, tended a garden and, against prison rules, wrote the notes for what would become bestselling books, including Inside the Third Reich. There was no question that Speer’s contrition in court, and perhaps his cooperation with Nitze, saved his life.After serving the full 20 years, Speer was released in 1966. He grew wealthy, lived in a cottage in Heidelberg, West Germany, and cultivated his image as a “good Nazi” who had spoken candidly about his past. But questions about Speer’s truthfulness began to dog him soon after his release. In 1971, Harvard University’s Erich Goldhagen alleged that Speer had been aware of the extermination of Jews, based on evidence that Speer had attended a Nazi conference in 1943 at which Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s military commander, had spoken openly about “wiping the Jews from the face of the earth.” Speer admitted that he’d attended the conference but said he had left before Himmler gave his infamous “Final Solution” speech.Speer died in a London hospital in 1981. His legacy as an architect was ephemeral: None of his buildings, including the Reich Chancellery or the Zeppelinfeld stadium, are standing today. Speer’s legacy as a Nazi persists. A quarter-century after his death, a collection of 100 letters emerged from his ten-year correspondence with Helene Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance leader. In one of the letters, Speer admitted that he had indeed heard Himmler’s speech about exterminating the Jews. “There is no doubt—I was present as Himmler announced on October 6, 1943, that all Jews would be killed,” Speer wrote. “Who would believe that I suppressed this, that it would have been easier to have written all of this in my memoirs?”SourcesBooks: Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, Henry Holt and Company, 2009. Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, Simon & Schuster, 2006. Dan Van Der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997.Articles: “Letter Proves Speer Knew of Holocaust Plan,” By Kate Connolly, The Guardian, March 12, 2007. “Wartime Reports Debunk Speer as the Good Nazi,” By Kate Connolly, The Guardian, May 11, 2005. “Paul Nitze: Master Strategist of the Cold War,” Academy of Achievement, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/nit0int-5. ”Speer on the Last Days of the Third Reich,” USSBS Special Document, http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/donovan/pdf/Batch_14/Vol_CIV_51_01_03.pdf. “The Long Arm of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey,” by Rebecca Grant, Air Force Magazine, February 2008.Read more: The Candor and Lies of Nazi Officer Albert Speer

I am going to answer this question, as simply as possible. Then, I’m going to add details, so you can spot the bias for yourself at home!Why do conservatives view CNN as a very liberal biased news source?For the same reason that Liberals view FOXNews as an extremist, right-wing conservative-biased news source?Because they are. Like…. super biased. More biased than most people even realize, and most people "KNOW" they are biased.How do I know they are biased?There are two aspects of journalism: Reporting and Opinion. Once upon a time, these two things never coincided. Reporters reported, and Opinion Editors Wrote op-eds. It was considered anathema for a journalist to add “commentary” on a piece of news reporting. This is, unfortunately for us and our general love of Taxonomy, no longer the case. But I’m going to proceed as if it were for a few moments.In reporting, simply reporting “facts” did not make you “unbiased”. But it ensured, as much as is possible, accuracy. For a reporter, there are only 3 things that matter: Speed, Detail, and Accuracy. S/he who gets the biggest, error-free story first, wins (providing that they don’t miss any details.) It’s a simple game, and a thrill if you’re a journalist. However it requires you to ask some questions: What is a “big” story? If I report that a dog saves a child, that might be a big story. But if that child is the re-incarnate Dalai Lama, that could be considered bigger. But is it bigger than the stock market dropped 400 points in a week because of a diplomatic incident where the ambassador to China released a report on the nation’s intent to withdraw from a trade agreement?The answer is “It depends”. It depends on who your audience is and how important they think the story is. It depends on how expected or unexpected the event is. It depends on who your editors are. It depends on how the information will impact society. It depends.Now every day…. EVERY. GODDAMN. DAY there are events that happen. In the U.S. 6775 people (on average) die every day. There are currently 61 armed conflicts (i.e. military actions happening between 2 or more ORGANIZED governmental or non-governmental groups) happening around the world resulting in 45,000 fatalities this year! In 2003, there were also 175,000 published books (Excluding self-publishing, pay-to-print). More recent estimates put that number closer to 500,000). Hollywood released 125 films to theaters. Over 650 different artists released a Top 200 Song in 2016. Also, George Clooney got into a motorcycle accident. As will over 100,000 other motorcyclists this year.My point is that there is a lot of things happening. Reporting of facts can become overwhelming. There’s no way that you the viewer could drink in all of the facts of all of the events that happen. So Editors have to curate what gets published each day. They do this by determining what stories are “newsworthy”These events are not “news”. These are just events. They matter to someone, but that doesn’t make them newsworthy.Newsworthiness weighs 5 major factors: What Makes a Story Newsworthy?1. TimingA story with only average interest needs to be told quickly if it is to be told at all. If it happened today, it's news. If the same thing happened last week, it's no longer interesting.2. SignificanceThe number of people affected by the story is important.3. ProximityStories which happen near to us.Note that proximity doesn't have to mean geographical distance. (It could indicate national, cultural, or social proximity.)4. ProminenceFamous people get more coverage just because they are famous. (My thoughts go out to you, George.)5. Human InterestHuman interest stories appeal to emotion. They aim to evoke responses such as amusement or sadness.(As I said earlier, these are all dependent on the audience as well, so the Wall Street Journal is going to look a lot different than ESPN, which will vary drastically from TMZ. )This is where BIAS comes into play. As an editor, you get to determine which stories are newsworthy. By default, that means that, since you have a limited amount of space, nothing that doesn’t fit is (newsworthy). whomp whomp.You only had space to publish 3 stories, so you covered immigration politics, the Thai cave rescue, and Elon Musk? Sorry, India, your Supreme Court’s taking a case on the decriminalization of gay sex is not newsworthy.India’s Supreme Court Considers Decriminalizing Gay SexAnd I —because this is what I do— can see your bias in what you choose to display. Let me show you what I mean.A bias is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a particular tendency, trend, inclination, feeling or opinion, especially one that is preconceived or unreasonable.”OITE Careers BlogPublishing reports on Sports is not biased if I’m ESPN. That’s a reasonable decision based on the publication mission statement. The same goes with with publishing only stories about women in the Ladies Home Journal. Or about police activity in a crime blotter.(“But Ivan,” I hear someone saying, “the definition says ‘a particular tendency, trend, inclination, feeling or opinion…’; the “especially” isn’t needed.Thank you for your comment. In the definition, the use of the word ‘especially’ implies that the definition is not quite as precise as some would like it to be.Words are, in themselves, tautologies: they are themselves and can only be themselves. But definitions are approximations of meaning.Brother is “brother”. Not only in what it means in context, but in its function, in its spelling.And necessarily in its connotation. [Try saying, “That’s Jon, the son of my mother and father,” and see if you don’t get an follow up questions.]If I was typing a report and wrote, “Donald Trump was a a political leader who sought support by appealing to popular desires,” I think that it would likely be agreed with. But if I wrote, “Donald Trump was a demagogue.” There would be a lot of reaction. One of those things is not like the other.Why? Because a definition, while it can indicate the meaning of a word, can not encapsulate it entirely.THUS, in the case of “bias,” assuming that the definition is directing the reader to a place of “I wonder what that word means,” to “Ohhh……..”, the definition gives a broad brush stroke indication of the meaning, and then emphasizes one particular element in which the connotation plays a significant role.Otherwise, it would have been more appropriate to use the wordInclination: a person's natural tendency or urge to act or feel in a particular way; a disposition or propensity.But we did not use ‘inclination’ because the connotation in the word ‘bias’ is essential.But thank you for allowing me to address this important point.)If I were to publish reports about sports, but ignore women’s sports, even when my audience was saying, “Hey, where are the scores of the WNBA game from last night?” or if I were to publish stories about the Broadway but ignore anything that referenced Lin Maunel Miranda. [seriously, Hamilton came out 3 years ago, and still people can’t stop talking about this show: Lin-Manuel Miranda and William Daniels Talk Hamilton, 1776, Mr. Feeny, and More | Playbill], that would be a bias. One could could make the case that I was not just displaying a tendency, but displaying an irrational one.Not all biases are conscious. Some are. But the irrationality or the prejudicial aspects of bias make it a problem. Not the having of a particular inclination.THAT BEING SAIDCNN and FOXNews are totally biased. Their bias is not a function of their opinion pieces (which are incredibly partisan) or their corporate mission statements. They are the products of their editorial decision making and reporting.I’ll give you one example from each.Firstly, according to CNN, Trump is the MOST IMPORTANT thing happening today.Of the 23 links on the front page, his name is in 8 of them. This is an editorial choice. There were a lot of things that happened today. This is a disproportional representation.Next, let’s look at the three featured stories:The one front and center is Trump = American Idiot. That’s not even news, if we think of news as reporting on events that have happened. Instead, this could be described as preview? “Teen plans to eat record-breaking number of hotdogs” is fundamentally different than “teen eats record-breaking number of hotdogs”. If it not “news” (according to Ivan, which… I’m tired, and this is long… it’s not news. ), what is it? bias conditioning. This is the job of media, it delivers messages. Remember above, when I said that timing plays a role in newsworthiness? and if it isn’t a story today, sorry?Well, that’s not always true. becauseGreen Day fans bid to get American Idiot to UK Number 1 for Donald ...The Sun-Apr 29, 2018The Facebook page, called "Get American Idiot to No.1 for Trump's State Visit", ... Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong hasn't hidden his hatred of Trump and ...…This “story” came out in The SUN over 2 Months Ago.Remember when I said that thing about proximity being important? This is about a song from 20-ish years ago making a resurgence in the UK. It’s been picked up, and released months later, over the thousands of other stories that actually are happening today (and are actual news) to make a point: Donald Trump is a stupid, post-90’s, oh-my-god-why-was-everything-so-emo-then, villain.The center column is filled with words that are aggressively disparaging or weighted: “Reality Show—Criminal Sentencing—Bowed to Elite— Foreign clients….Bad, crazy, POTUS DT.CNN is crafting a story, just through headlines, and every good story needs a villain to loathe. Unlike reports, where individuals are allowed to form their own opinions about the data presented and say, “Wow, this seems terrible!” (or not), good stories lead the audience to feel and think what the author intends.Our story has two parts, both about non-white parents and children and their struggle to be reunited after facing terrifying circumstances. Different factors involved, but essentially the same stakes.On the right, Thailand. Father hugs his rescued son. A bitter-sweet ending to a harrowing experience (my thoughts go out to the family of the diver who perished during the rescue). This is the happy hopeful sides of the story that makes you have faith in miracles and hope in a general goodness.On the left, the US government fails to reunite children they snatched (that’s a loaded word too!) from their parents. They are the facilitators of justified “child abuse”, terrorizing refugee children who, according to the president, deserve it.(NOTE: because we read from left to right, your eyes likely began at the middle story, read the one on the left, then went to the one on the right. In case you didn’t, they made sure to make the font and picture on the left bigger.)The editors are not stupid. The layer emotions of contempt, then outrage, then the warm sympathetic feel-goodness that comes when there’s a happy ending. “Where’s our happy ending?” CNN readers cry out! “REUNITE THE CHILDREN!”Notice how many of the words are chosen because each elicits an emotional response from its readers: Emotional, Child Abuse, Terror, Hugs, hope, whimper. They are evocative. The page is being used to create a tumultuous effect within the emotions of the reader. I would suggest that in the editorial meetings, the goal was to trigger that animalistic/maternal instinct to protect our young from dangerous predators.If that if the case, this is an example of how successful manipulation can be done simply using layout and word choice.(Note: Even the signifiers demonstrate bias:“Opinion: In Trump’s Court Pick, Who Won”, the word opinion is added so the reader knows that the content they are clicking on is not reporting. This is correct.“Santorum: Trump Bowed to Elite With Pick” is equally responsible: They attribute the source of the inflammatory opinion so that the reader will know that the link takes them to reporting. Reporting of an opinion, yes, but they’re just the messenger.“Kavanaugh is a Scripted End to a Reality Show” - CNN has demonstrated elsewhere on this page that they understand the importance of the practice of distinguishing between opinion and reporting. But here they didn’t do it.The implication is that the “reality show” article is factual reporting.)All of this is evidence that CNN is biased. It’s not just left-leaning, like the Washington Post. It’s not just punditry, Like MSNBC. It’s opinion and rhetoric, disguised as news, designed to outrage rather than to inform.CNN’s tone has a hysterical quality that rivals Breitbart, and they strive to be as manipulative as FOX. I find the factual reporting to be accurate, but even that is mixed among the opinions, which are not clearly labeled, so that it becomes difficult for the average reader to easily distinguish between news and editorial.If you want a run down on Fox, I will defer to the funny guy.Everything Wrong with Fox News - Last Week Tonight with John OliverThe other side of Journalism, Op-eds, will require a whole ‘nother post.(Read Lawfare, it you want to read some good, thoughtful (as opposed to reactionary) opinion writing.)The real question I have to ask, however, is, “Are CNN and FOXNews Even News Sources?”I would answer that with a, “No, they are not”. They certainly report some news items, but that is not their primary purpose, anymore than it was the Daily Show’s purpose. (Do you remember the time he attacked Tucker Carlson?! Classic! Le Sigh.)I will also add that each one is something that the other is not. Believing that CNN and FOXNews are news sources is analogous to believing that Instagram photos and The National Enquirer both depict real life.Post-truth politics - WikipediaEDIT: For sources of actual, you know, news, I would recommend: PBS News Hour. HANDS DOWN. THIS WHAT NEWS SHOULD BE.Also, Reuters, Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and please, for the love of your civic duty, read your local paper.NPR is nice to listen to, and CSPAN gives you unfiltered, unvarnished politics.For actual news, with partisan opinion writing, NYT, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Economist, Foreign Policy.[Edit: Thank you all for your fantastic conversation, shares, and updates. There are so many interesting and respectful points of view. I think it is wonderful to see how many people care about understanding bias, and holding news sources accountable.]

I can answer this, although with a caveat. Rather… several caveats. There is some splitting of hairs and ambiguity in the phrasing of the question, even as short as it is.First… the term “birds of prey”. I spent four years working at the Carolina Raptor Center. We only accepted raptors into our hospital. All other injured birds were handed off or redirected to the Waterfowl Rescue some miles away. They accepted all waterfowl, as their name implies, but also song birds and virtually any bird that wasn't a raptor. Raptors require a slightly more complex system to rehabilitate them, an example of which would be Mouse School. Mouse School is a carefully calculated program, meant to assure that all patients can hunt for themselves, before they are released. This would apply either to an injury that the raptor is healing from, or to orphans who have been raised from chicks without the benefit of having their parents available to teach them and encourage their natural instincts. I'm not meaning to minimize the work done by the thousands of rehabbers who work diligently rescuing birds that are not raptors. They too have special requirements. The word “raptor” is generally accepted as a synonym for the term “bird of prey”. However, there is a semantic exception. This would be the vultures. They are classified as a raptor, but not necessarily as a bird of prey. So there is some word wrangling there. Yet, for the purpose of answering this question, I will include the raptor group that are vultures.Second… “friendly as pets”. Ambiguity. That phrase need be broken down into two concepts. “Friendly” and “pets”. First, the latter… pets. No raptor or bird of prey will be or can be a pet. Legal issues aside, they are wild animals, and by definition, in most cases, won't be pets. It could be argued that some wild animals can indeed be pets, such as certain constricting and/or non-venomous snakes. But for the most part, pets don't come from the world of wild animals. Due to millions of years of evolution, they cannot be depended upon to not revert to “wild” behavior, and therefore be dangerous to the person who regards them as a pet.I know. That's all a mouthful. As I said… there's ambiguity involved.Having said all that… there are some birds of prey that could be considered as friendly under certain circumstances. Although, not necessarily desirable circumstances. This circumstance is called “imprinting”. Imprinting refers to a critical period of time early in an animal’s life when it forms attachments and develops a concept of its own identity. In other words… if you are the first being that an animal sees when it is hatched/born, it might imprint upon you as you being its mother; particularly when you start feeding it. There is an extremely wide range of imprinting tendencies in the animal kingdom. Some are far more susceptible to imprinting than others. Since we are talking about birds of prey/raptors, I will tell you about the vultures. Vultures are extremely susceptible to imprinting. With these birds, among all raptors, extreme care must be taken to avoid imprinting. When we at the Raptor Center are raising baby vultures, to be returned to the wild, all possible precautions are taken. In fact, there is a zone on the property where the Raptor Center is built, that is a “No Talking Zone”. Not so much as a whisper is allowed any closer than about 100 feet from the baby vulture enclosure, while we are making our feeding rounds for the young vultures. We can't allow the human voice to be associated with food. And when they are new-born, even further drastic measures are taken to prevent imprinting. When we are hand feeding the chicks, we wear something like a gilly suit. That's the camouflage netting that military snipers wear in order to not be seen. In fact, here is an example of me wearing such a suit while feeding vulture chicks:You'll notice that I am also holding a stuffed vulture puppet to try to trick them into believing that they are getting fed by their vulture mother.Of all raptors, vultures are by far the most intelligent. This fact is related in some way to them being the most easily imprinted upon. A fully imprinted vulture would, in a sense, believe it is human… or believe that humans are vultures; however you want to phrase it. We have had such a vulture at the Raptor Center. He arrived to us, already in that state. He would essentially behave as a pet, following us around inside the hospital, exploring things and generally just hanging out with humans as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Much like a dog. Although this was at times fun and humorous, it was also very unfortunate, as he is fully dependent upon humans for survival. We just had to make the best of an unnatural and unfortunate situation. Even though he at times acted pet-like, he most certainly wasn't potty trained. And he had not lost his propensity for projectile vomiting, which is a vulture characteristic that aids them in escaping danger by lightening the load, so to speak, and expelling all that it just ate in order to quickly get off the ground. I can tell you from experience, neither of these fluids is pleasant!So there you go… my first answer to the question… WITH all the caveats. The vulture… of either flavor… Turkey or Black. Here's the Turkey Vulture:And here is an adolescent Black Vulture comforting an even younger Black Vulture that has just been transferred from the small enclosure you saw in the video above, to the next step in its journey towards being released into the wild:Despite the perception that I may have given, painting the vulture as a fun and gentle creature, I will add the fact that in the four years I worked in raptor rescue, the nearest I came to an extremely dangerous injury was during my handling of a Black Vulture. I was carrying him from the hospital, along the trail in the woods, back to his enclosure after a health check. I need to mention that when handling any raptor, extreme care must be taken to avoid being taloned. Beaks, even eagle beaks, are relatively harmless to humans. It's the feet that will get ya! But… with vultures, it is the opposite. They have very weak feet and dull talons. However, their long beak is a force to be reckoned with! I was carrying the vulture against my chest, keeping his wings folded and in control. But I neglected to properly control his neck and head, and I received a fairly serious injury a mere half inch below my eye. Just a little higher, and I would be wearing an eye patch today.The next raptor I will mention is the American Kestrel. These small birds of prey are like the Warner Brothers cartoon, Henry the rootin’ tootin’ Chicken Hawk that, although small, is always trying to catch and dine on the giant rooster Foghorn Leghorn.Kestrels are as mighty as any other raptor and many birds have fallen victim to their hunts. This one particular Kestrel though, was also a bird that fell victim to imprinting. His name is Maus.He became what we call an “Ambassador” bird. He is employed as a teaching aid to help people learn about raptors and wildlife in general. I love this guy. Actually, I took a lot of photos of him just before he was set to make a flight to Missouri (on a plane!), to become an ambassador at an animal center there.One of the most beautiful of all raptors, in my opinion. Unlike many permanent residents at raptor centers, Maus could fly. But he was so imprinted that he was no longer releasable. Maus is still a wild animal, despite the fact that he too, acted pet-like.Now, Maus can perch on my head, but that's only because of his relative size. This other wild raptor could fairly easily puncture at least a few of his talons right through your skull bone, directly into the gray matter of your brain:Yes, you heard me right; right into your brain. Maus is a fully imprinted Kestrel. That's still a far cry from a tame parakeet or conure, whose behavior can be somewhat predictable. Between similarly-sized Kestrels and Conures, Kestrels are instinctual killers. Conures are not. And that makes all the difference in the world.Last point I need to make concerns the practice of falconry. There is not a single falconer out there who considers his bird of prey as a pet. That is taught even before a person begins to learn Falconry 101.Falconry birds and imprinted, hand-raised birds of prey… all of them are wildlife. The bottom line with wildlife is that they are unpredictable in all cases, regardless of the circumstances of how they were acquired or raised. From raccoons, to tigers, to raptors. Under certain circumstances, some of them can behave friendly towards certain humans. Under certain circumstances some of them can behave pet-like. Not as a “pet”… but “pet-like”. The distinction must be made and fully understood. Dangerous unpredictably is ALWAYS present.And, oh yeah… without proper licensing and training… it's illegal.You folks in England and other nations… as I understand it, there are ways to legally own an owl as a “pet”. I also understand that in the post-Harry Potter era, quite a number of owls were acquired as pets, many of which suffered unfortunate fates after people realized that yes, they are in fact wild animals, despite what the seller of such birds told you. And yes… they are fully unpredictable. My advice; for the bird’s sake… don't do it.