Budgie
We had a budgie when I was a kid. For some reason, my dad decided to teach It to recite physical laws. So it would chirp "Entropy always increases" and "In a dilute solution the activity of the solute is directly proportional to the concentration" ( that took a while to learn).

We used to let the budgie out of its cage to fly around the room. One day, after a particularly hard session learning Boyle's law, it was having a flap around. I was playing with a little flying-disc toy I had got out of a cereal pack. For fun, I launched the disc towards the budgie, to see if he would fly with it. Unfortunately the disc hit the budgie on the head and it plummeted to the floor, senseless.

Horrified, I picked him up and replaced him in his cage, lying on the floor, then left the scene of the crime and rushed off to my room to read Whizzer. Pretty soon I heard a shriek from my mother when she discovered the budgie, now lifeless. Poor little budgie: all that knowledge didn't save him. Perhaps we should have taught him aerodynamics or first aid instead.
(Smale is stuffed, Thu 31 Jan 2013, 20:10, Reply)