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lokie-dokie · 2 years ago

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Pigeon domestication: Feral Pigeons are not wildlife.

There were some inaccuracies in the first post on this topic, so I’m making a new one. A second edition, if you will.

One of my followers once asked me why it was that pigeons in wildlife rehab should be held when other animals should be handled as little as possible.

I misunderstood the crap out of her question! And it took three posts to realize I had!

Injured or orphaned Wildlife in a rehab center need to be handled as little as possible to avoid imprinting onto humans. They need to be able to survive on their own, and developing the habit of asking humans for hand outs will lead it to becoming malnourished at best and get it killed for being a nuisance at worst.

Mammals in particular may be killed on approach as fearless approach of humans by a wild animal is one of the warning signs that it might have rabies, which requires brain tissue to test for.

Pigeons are not wild animals. On principal, imprinting avoidance should not apply to them.

Furthermore, it causes them a lot of harm.

Pigeons are intensely social birds! They suffer from touch starvation as intensely as a human infant and can be mentally stunted or even out right stress to death from lack of interaction.

More urgently: We are simply not capable of teaching a domestic pigeon peep to survive in the wild.

Pigeons are social and observational learners, with cognition equivalent to a human 5 year old. Like human children, pigeon squeakers are TAUGHT how to be pigeons.

Their social structure is VERY human like! Their father takes them out on foraging trips (because mom either has or is getting ready to lay the next clutch) and teaches them where to find food, water, and nest materials, what to eat, where to shelter, and how to interact with other pigeons. How and when to defer to the status of older established flock mates to avoid a fight and how and when to stick up for themselves to make sure they get their fair share of resources.

Songbirds and nearly all other columbids kick their kids out as soon as they are self feeding and they either make it or they don’t. Their parents will chase them out if they come back.

Feral Pigeons only leave their families if the flock has grown too large for local resources to support.

Truthfully, orphaned feral pigeons do not belong in wildlife rehab at all. Pet shelters should be set up for them.

Feral Pigeons are not wild animals. Imprinting avoidance should not apply to them any more than it should apply to an orphaned puppy.

Feral puppies don’t get raised among fox kits or coyote or wolf pups at a wildlife rehab and sent out for release “into the wild”.

Seriously. Take a moment to consider the following scenario:

A shelter gets an orphaned or injured puppy. They bottle feed it until it can reliably feed itself, heal it’s injuries, and clean out its parasites.

And then they return that just weaned, newly healthy puppy to the alley from whence it came.

How many of you, of you actually saw this happen, or heard the plan for the puppy’s release, would not be INSTANTLY concerned for its well being?

How many of your guts just clenched at the thoughts that flooded your minds of it getting hit by a car? Going hungry enough to have to eat garbage? Getting into something poisonous or sharp? Dying because it was left alone with no shelter or resources in a hostile environment?

How many of you, upon hearing that that puppy was going back into the street, would protest that it needs a home? That it’s a pet? That it’s helpless? That it’s most likely to die if it’s released?

What would your reaction be if that rehab brushed all of those aside by pointing out that there are adult strays eating garbage and dodging cars, and they’re fine?

How many of you would get upset? How many would protest that those strays aren’t healthy? That they are skinny, full of parasites, visibly sick, and limping from old wounds?

What if, at all shelters, only purebred puppies, or puppies with obvious fancy traits were put up for open adoption, and all mutts were “released” back onto the street, with all offers to adopt them turned down because they were born outside? What if you could only request to take home a mutt puppy if it lost the use of a limb and was deemed unreleasable?

This happens to pigeons every day, and they are no less domesticated than dogs are.

Dogs have been traveling with humans since the time when there were several species of human!

But pigeons have been with us since our settlements became permanent, and that relationship is nothing to sneeze at!

Do you know why doves have the religeous significance they do?

Because of the Wild Rock Dove, which is to domestic pigeons what the wolf is to domestic dogs.

Rock Doves are cliff nesters native to Turkey, India, the northernmost coast of Africa and southern Europe, who live only in very specific locations: Seaside cliffs on the edge of deserts.

They are grain eaters that need to drink a certain amount of fresh water every day.

If you were lost in the desert, finding a Rock Dove would save your life, if you could keep it in sight.

During the day, it would lead you to water because it can’t go a day with out.

At night, it would lead you back to safe, habitable shelter. After all, if there are predators or noxious gas in abundance, the Rock Doves couldn’t live there either.

It’s true that pigeons were initially domesticated for meat, but the Rock Dove’s bond to a specific home site and the unerring navigation that returned them reliably to it every night lead them to being domesticated more like dogs than any other livestock.

Pigeon holes are really easy to make. It’s just an even opening in a mud or stone wall deep enough for a fully grown bird to be completely sheltered and wide enough for two pigeons to build their nest and raise two peeps in.

Babies could be collected from the wild at around two weeks of age, feathered enough to thermoregulate and just starting to wean from pigeon milk to seed. At this age, they could be moved into the man made pigeon holes and hand fed until they could feed themselves.

It would be three to four weeks before they began to be really capable of flight, so the man made dovecote became the Home site onto which the babies imprinted to just as much as their handler.

If the keepers were smart, they brought home a group of babies, because rock doves are social with a cooperative family structure.

If taken at the right ages, that group formed a mini flock, just big enough to watch each others backs and their surroundings on foraging trips farther and farther afield.

When pigeons take mates from another flock, the pair decides which family to join based on the security of the nest site and availability of resources, so pigeons from a man made dovecote always had the advantage of superior security. New mates came home with the tamed peeps and learned by observation that the human care takers were harmless protectors.

If the farmer was smart, they’d only harvest meat or eggs sparingly and at night so that the pigeons would not associate the human with being preyed upon.

Because pigeons could go out and forage for themselves and be trusted to return, the farmer didn’t have to feed them, and a person could not be too poor to own pigeons.

Not only were they live stock that fed themselves and brought more birds back with them, the guano of a well fed pigeon is one of the most nutritious fertilizers on earth!

If you want crops to grow in a desert landscape, moist pigeon guano worked into the ground will work wonders!

Pigeon guano eventually became so highly prized that people who could afford to hired armed guards to protect their cote!

We kinda ALWAYS knew about pigeon navigation, but the Greeks and Romans wrote a LOT about their use as messengers.

Messengers were not just any domestic pigeon! Speed and navigational accuracy were the traits their lines were selected for exclusively, so these were expensive specialty birds, especially beloved by the well-to-do and the military.

Every fort and palace had a cote for messenger pigeons so that they could recieve the most urgent of messages in situations where a human runner was just not fast enough.

Royal emissaries and platoons of soldiers out on a mission were sent with a supply of birds from that palace or fort so that if they needed to get a message out, they could send it by the fastest carrier over the straightest path.

Pigeons continued to be used in the messenger capacity until only about 50 years ago.

During this time when every one depended on them for swift communication, EVERY ONE loved and revered pigeons!

When Eugenics began to fascinate the European well to do and dog shows came to be, pigeon varieties also blossomed!

There were pigeons all over the world at this point, and different regions had so many different ideas of what shape and color and pattern made a beautiful Pigeon! While some valued the appearance, others valued a unique areal performance or a more musical singing voice.

There are at least as many distinct breeds of pigeon now as there are of dog! I have heard that there are more, possibly even considerably more, but I don’t know enough about dog breed diversity to say for certain whether or not those assessments are accurate.

Their diversity so inspired Charles Darwin that his editors had to twist his arm to keep the Origin of Species from focusing almost entirely on them!

We have taken pigeons EVERYWHERE with us! And when we loved and took care of them, everybody benefited.

But about 50 years ago was when technology caught up with and surpassed the speed of pigeon borne messages, and pigeons were slower with more expensive upkeep.

As previously stated, the military were not the only people who loved pigeons.

But a LOT of the people who kept them after the military phased them out in the US were immigrants and people of color.

It was a status symbol not to need gardens or farms or livestock, so pigeon coops became associated largely with poor neighboorhoods and immigrants.

As pigeons fell out of favor, and more and more ferals started living on the closest thing to a comfortable environment: Buildings.

As they were fed by fewer and fewer people and had access to less and less grain, it became more common to see the white streaked splatters of the pure uric acid that pigeons excrete on an empty stomach.

Uric acid eats stone, concrete, asphalt, and especially metal.

Feral Pigeons thus became linked to property damage, and the smear campaign that coined the description “Rats with wings” ( http://www.audubon.org/news/the-origins-our-misguided-hatred-pigeons ) and linked them with filth and disease was the final blow to the public’s esteem for this animal that has been our partner and companion through THOUSANDS of years of history.

That description of pigeons was all it took to turn thousands of years of adoration and respect into knee jerk revulsion.

Add the fact that domestication favors year round reproduction, and 50 years later, the feral population of pigeons is staggering.

Millions are spent to kill them off and drive them out using everything from poison to spikes to nets, tar, traps, and fines levied on the kind souls that recognize their hunger and feed them.

The Street Pigeon Project spearheaded in Germany has found that the most effective way to decrease the feral population and minimize the damage they cause to buildings is to, get this: Take FUCKING CARE OF THEM!!!

They built a big, comfortable rooftop loft with lots of nesting spaces, provided a good mix or grain, seed, legumes, and calcuim, and swapped out the eggs with fakes.

The unrestrained, non-coerced feral pigeons spent 80% of their time in that loft, only leaving to stretch their wings.

It was more comfortable than the awnings, eves, attics, and signs that had been the best nesting grounds available, so they left!

With no need to range out to look for food, they didn’t go very far.

On full bellies, with good food, their poo wasn’t just pure uric acid anymore!

With eggs swapped out as they were found, reproduction decreased by 90%!

And the best part? It cost SO much less to house and feed the ferals than it did to try to exterminate them!

That’s not even scratching the surface of the OTHER benefits that could be extended from that project!

Pigeon eggs are edible! Even if the thought squicks out people and they can’t be regulated, animals can eat pigeon eggs too. They could be donated to wild life rehabs and animal shelters.

A street pigeon project could partner with community gardens to clean the lofts and keep the fertilizer they gather. THEY could also use the eggs to compost!

Cleaning the loft could also count as community service!

Pigeons did not invade cities. We abandoned them there, after they helped us coordinate building and connecting them.

They are, in every sense of the words, abandoned, forgotten sky puppies.

And they deserve to be treated with the same concern and compassion as every other lost pet.

Adult ferals would be more hurt than helped by capture, but they should have the option of a safe place to go to be fed and cared for.

Weaned babies deserve to go to loving homes.

I know there are too many to home right now and that isn’t feasible for rehabs that get hundreds of them, but where rehoming isn’t an option, they should at LEAST be acclimated in a group with supplemental feeding until they find their way in the world.

Pigeons were made what they are by us. They were abandoned by us.

We even forgot that the pidge we see every day on the street are domesticated birds!

They are literally stray dogs with wings!

Remember. Tell other people.

And please, please… be kind to the Sky Puppies.

They deserve to be loved again.

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