Minecraft is known for its wide player base ranging from a variety of ages, so when it comes to in-game behavior, some have been concerned that it could be encouraging kids to poison their animal companions.
Parrots appeared in a snapshot build 1.12 for Minecraft on PC. Players were given the colorful feathered friends and like other mobs in the game, players can breed them to create more by giving them an item. Not long before its rollout, developers teased on Twitter that the birds were attracted to cookies in their game.
If you want to find your very own parrot in the world. Arm yourself with cookies and walk around and listen in a jungle biome. 😉
— Maria Lemón (@MiaLem_n) March 30, 2017
But it’s the idea of sharing cookies with parrots that has the community stirred up. A Reddit thread of over 37 thousand upvotes and counting has taken the throne with a clear stance on the matter: Please remove feeding chocolate to birds to make them breed (via Eurogamer.)
The case being that feeding chocolate to birds is actually poisonous, a fact that Minecraft developers hadn’t realized would be an issue for the video game. Mojang has stated in an interview with Motherboard that they will be changing it on the community’s request.
“If Minecraft has any effect on children’s behavior, we want it to be a positive one, so we’ll change the item used to breed parrots before the 1.12 update is released,” Bergensten said. “Our reasoning for originally using cookies was twofold; it gave cookies a reason to exist within Minecraft, and it was a subtle reference to the Nirvana song ‘Polly.’ However, we didn’t consider what the chocolate ingredient would mean to real life parrots!”
As of the 1.12 pre-3 snapshot, parrots now prefer seeds over chocolate chip cookies. The World of Color Update 1.12 still doesn’t have a specific release date for Minecraft on PC, but at least Mojang has proven that it isn’t up to ruffle anyone’s feathers with future content.
