The Merchant and the Talking Parrot

A merchant, proud of his clever talking parrot who could report every visitor and event that occurred while he traveled, left it in charge of watching his home and shop during a long business trip, trusting its honest reports completely.

While he was away, his wife entertained a secret lover in the house, and the parrot, true to its training, reported everything faithfully to the merchant upon his return — every visit, every detail. Furious, the merchant confronted his wife, who, thinking quickly, told her husband the parrot had clearly gone senile and was inventing wild stories, since it had also claimed to see the roof fly off during a storm that never actually happened, among other exaggerations she'd secretly coached it to "confirm" if questioned again.

The merchant, testing the bird's reliability with a false claim of his own, found the parrot agreeing to obviously untrue statements the wife had planted — and, believing it truly had lost its wits, dismissed all its reports as nonsense, including the true one. The wife's clever manipulation had turned honest testimony into something indistinguishable from foolishness, and the merchant never learned the truth at all.