#messenger pigeons have to be transported AWAY from home

[theriu]

The scene in Avatar: The Last Airbender where they are in the Fire Nation and Sokka has this messenger hawk, and he's like "Hey I'm gonna put a message on this hawk and send it back to these people I know!" and lets it go and everyone just accepts it like yeah of course it will get the message where it's supposed to go. That's what a messenger hawk is for. And I'm like. Do none of you understand the concept of a messenger pigeon and that they only fly back home. You are in the Fire Nation you got the bird in the Fire Nation it has never been outside the Fire Nation, How Did You Give It Directions.

[theramseyloft]

Pigeon rescue being shut down for “Keeping nuisance animals” needs help finding homes for their birds.

From Tutu.Pigeon’s instagram;

https://www.instagram.com/tutu.pigeon/ 

Hi everyone, I don't even know how to write this post and my heart aches saying this. Our next door neighbors complained about the availability in our backyard and the Garfield NJ health department came to shut us down. 

We have a week to re-home our beautiful rescues and I've been working night and day to find them new homes. 

I've been summoned to court for the following violations: 1. Keeping of animals considered a public nuisance, 2. Having a coop that's too close to my home and the neighbor (needs to be 25 feet or more away), and 3. Having a wild bird feeder that is open. 

Apparently, we needed a permit to have the pigeons and the city is not allowing me to remedy the situation and apply for a permit. 

We do not have enough room in the yard to move the aviary (it has to be taken down) and as renters, our landlord would not be happy about all the pigeons in the home. We are cornered, and it is another reminder that people really do not understand or appreciate pigeons. 

How can animals inside their cage bother anyone? We are heartbroken and will do whatever possible to keep Tutu as a pet. 

We have been blessed to have people step up to help us, and we are arranging to drive all over the United States to find the birds placement in sanctuaries. 

If you would like to support us in any way, please donate to our fundraiser (link in bio) so we can make the necessary trips to Vermont, Oklahoma, and other neighboring states. It will be multiple days of driving but our beautiful rescues deserve another chance. 

Thank you all for the love you've shown us and we will continue to run this page as best we can. I think there is much work to be done to fix people's perception about pigeons and so so many innocent animals that need saving. 

Our disabled pigeons have been granted temporary asylum upstate NY while they find forever homes. As I write this, Beaker, Doll, Minion, Slate, Ally, Dove, and Farble (our disabled pigeons) are on their way to a new life. 

10/3/20

Hi everyone, I wanted to update you on our situation. We are still actively re-homing our beautiful birds. Yesterday, 7 of our disabled/sick pigeons (Beaker, Ally, Slate, Dove, Minion, Farble, Doll) were transported upstate NY to a safe haven while we find permanent placement. The wonderful Sue from @themiafoundation is taking care of "The Jersey Seven" and set them up in their own beautiful room where they are comfortable (pic 9 and video 10). You probably already know of Sue, her pigeon and puppy combo have won the hearts of many! (picture 8). Yesterday were able to find a great home for our beautiful one-eyed Grover with @pidgey.fred. Grover immediately went on her new mommy's shoulder and I believe she's probably still sitting there 😆 We have lined up more permanent homes for our pigeons but still have 16 pigeons that need placement. We are planning our multi-state trip and need your support to make this happen. There are people interested in adopting our birds in California, Washington, Florida and Oklahoma. If you can support us, please donate to our link in our Bio. We appreciate everyone's help and support thus far. You have been so very kind to us. The GoFundMe link is new, specifically for re-homing, so I can share updates on there about our trip. If we can make this happen, you will be able to see pics and videos of our destinations and the Pigeon's new homes. ♥️

10/5/20

Today we say goodbye to our aviary, and the so many beautiful moments we have captured. I'm blessed to have crossed paths with these beautiful creatures and been able to save them. I will keep fighting to secure them a good life, we will not give up on them. Our babies have struggled enough in their early lives and I can only hope they will all find loving homes. Thank you for your donations, it means the world to us. Please continue to support us on our GoFundMe (link in Bio). We are also blessed to have a friend who is taking the aviary and our babies until we can adopt everyone out. This buys us some time. You have all been so generous with us. Even though at moments it doesn't feel like it- the world does have good people and when we stick together we achieve the impossible.

10/15/20

Hi everyone, just wanted to update you all on the aviary takedown and this entire situation. We have successfully relocated the aviary to our friend's home a few hours away. It took us two days of taking it apart, getting some help with the lifting and then reassembling it at it's new location. It was a stressful time for the birds as they spent most of this time in their boxes and carriers. Their new safe haven is quiet and beautiful with lots of other animals such as chicken and ducks roaming in a private yard. If you recall, this is the place we rehomed Sophie (renamed Quinn) when Tutu couldn't get along with him. The last pics and videos show the aviary that Quinn lives in with friends. Our birds are being kept at this location while we secure safe homes for them. Our friend is very kind and is making updates to the aviary to make it more spacious, since the birds are a bit cramped. Here, we had an indoor room that they used as well. In the video you can see that we installed a smaller cage to the end of the aviary which the birds seem to be enjoying. With regards to adoptions, we have secured a handful of new homes and even found a great person in CA willing to adopt most of our babies. Our special needs birds such as Beaker remain upstate and have vet appointments coming up. Dove (the beautiful white wedding release bird) has been successfully rehomed after recovering from her sickness. This week we are planning to rehome in NC and GA and are driving down from NJ. Next week we will rehome in CT. Finally, we still need to raise enough money to take the week long trip to CA.

10/16/20

Hi friends, our babies are being pampered in their foster home. We've installed an extra flight cage to make them more comfortable since they've been a bit cramped in the aviary without their indoor room. Look how everyone is settling in. We estimate that it will be a few weeks before we can make our CA trip where almost all of our remaining birds are being rehomed. We still have 6 birds upstate recovering and not yet ready for adoption. Recently Dove (the wedding release pigeon) was adopted out! For us to make the Cali trip, we need to reserve an RV since it's roughly 5 days of driving each way. It will be quite impossible to check into a hotel with our birds. 😅 We will also need the room for several cages and to be able to clean the cages and keep everyone happy and fed. We need to purchase more cages and pads. The rental costs $200 a day, plus gas/tolls. We have donations saved but estimate we need another $1,700 to make this trip happen. Please help us by donating or sharing our GoFundMe campaign (link in Bio).

10/17/20

Rehoming Trip Day 1: We are driving South to North Carolina today and rehoming some of our turtles in a beautiful pond setup (we've rescued 13 turtles through the years). @tani.turtle. We will then continue down to South Carolina where we should arrive by midnight. We are driving 12 hour days this weekend. Tomorrow we plan to rehome another turtle and also our pigeons in Georgia before heading back up to SC again for the night. Day 3 will consist of driving back home. In the meantime, we have tons of cameras set up so we can keep an eye on everyone at home and so we can talk to Tutu through the monitor. Thank you all for chipping in and help us fund our trip down South. We plan to make a couple trips to rehome more locally in Connecticut and keep saving up for our Cali trip which should conclude our rehoming. From there we will continue to place our special needs birds as they complete their recovery. 

We have quarantine spaces open here at The Ramsey Loft, if needed, but they seem to have fosters covered and, understandably, they would prefer their remaining pigeons to go straight to their adoptive homes.

If any one is looking to adopt a pigeon, please contact them via  Facebook messenger (https://m.me/yazmin.feliz) instagram page (@tutu.pigeon), or text  646-705-8047

[ezatluba]

A Final Proving Ground for Guide Dogs to the Blind: Midtown Manhattan

A school for Seeing Eye dogs uses the chaos of New York City as its ultimate test when matching young dogs with their blind masters.

By Corey Kilgannon

Nov. 6, 2018

Innes, a youthful German shepherd, was trying to make his way across a frenetic Manhattan intersection near Central Park and found himself facing down all sorts of projectiles — yellow cabs, bike messengers, pedicabs — as a deafening truck horn blasted and the traffic light changed against him.

But Innes was not negotiating this chaotic scene while out for an afternoon stroll. He was safeguarding his new master, Kathy Faul, 73, a blind woman from Swarthmore, Pa.

Both were relative strangers to New York City, but they had ventured into Manhattan expressly for moments like this, to experience its particular brand of street-level chaos, as the culmination of a thorough course of training by the Seeing Eye, a guide dog school in Morristown, N.J. Founded in 1929, it is the nation’s oldest training school for dogs and one of the largest of its kind. It even holds the trademark for the phrase “seeing eye.”

The school’s training is done in a suburban setting far calmer than Midtown Manhattan, an hour’s drive away. But for its ultimate challenge, and to assess a dog’s focus, trainers take the student-dog pairs into Manhattan as something of a proving ground.

Ozma, a guide dog, and her new master, Val Gee, 26, from Dayton, Ohio, navigated Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. They were assisted by an instructor, Kristen Oplinger, left.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

“There’s no more intense place than New York City to train the dogs — it’s the craziest environment they’ve ever been in,” said Brian O’Neal, a Seeing Eye trainer. “At the end of the training, the idea is, ‘O.K., they know the basics. Now can they handle the grind of the city?’ ”

To find out, Ms. Faul and another blind woman, Val Gee, 26, had arrived in a van to experience these extreme urban conditions, along with their dogs.

“I’m half scared, half so excited,” said Ms. Faul, gripping the stiff leather handle strapped to Innes. “But I figure, like the song says, if I can make it here, I can make it anywhere.”

Making it here involves navigating obstacles and potential hazards, from potholes to work zones to throngs of distracted pedestrians — not to mention the traffic madness Ms. Faul was now experiencing, which included a close encounter between Innes and a horse and buggy.

To their credit, Ms. Faul and Innes remained calm. She nudged Innes back on course, so he could lead her to the curb safely.

Even for dogs and owners who do not live in large cities, urban training can help prepare them for chaotic situations, such as shopping malls or carnivals.

They had begun the route in a rooftop parking lot above the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the starting point of a loop plotted specifically “to get them the best distractions,” said Ms. Faul’s trainer, Kristen DeMarco.

After squeezing into a packed elevator, they were soon slipping through subway turnstiles and being led by their dogs through crowds of commuters. They braved a packed stairway to the train platform, while being jostled by crowds.

The dogs remained calm on the subway platform, despite the clatter of passing trains and the blare of announcements.

“She keeps her focus really well,” Ms. Gee said, patting Ozma, a retriever mix.

For Ms. Gee, a psychotherapist from Dayton, Ohio, this was only her second time in New York City, after visiting as a 19-year-old when being paired with her first guide dog, which she recently retired.

“This is quite different from Dayton,” said Ms. Gee who, with her instructor, Kristen Oplinger, boarded an uptown C train and sat next to a sleeping passenger, while Ozma curled up under the seat.

Ms. Faul and Innes braved a packed stairway to the train platform, while being jostled by crowds.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

At Columbus Circle, they headed up the escalator to the street. The first test was neither traffic- nor pedestrian-related, but rather a tiny dog that was being walked nearby and intrigued Innes.

It would be the first of many tests of the dogs’ concentration. There would also be countless new smells, from well-visited fire hydrants to aromatic street vendors.

The sidewalks themselves were obstacle courses, with open basement doors creating gaping shaftways. There were gridlocked intersections, fluttering pigeons and jackhammers loud enough to interfere with dog-owner communication.

Columbus Circle was flooded with lunchtime crowds. The first challenge was the traffic rotary. The dogs stopped at the curb, as they were trained, and both Ms. Faul and Ms. Gee listened to the flow of traffic, to detect if the cars had stopped for the light. Then each gave her dog a forward command and proceeded to cross.

The dogs receive four months of training at the Seeing Eye, learning to guide around obstacles and obey commands, as well as street-crossing skills, including how to watch for traffic and keep their handlers safe from vehicles that might be turning or running lights.

“She keeps her focus really well,” Ms. Gee said of Ozma.

Officials with the Seeing Eye said they pair roughly 260 dogs each year with blind people living in the United States and Canada. Most live in some urban environment — largely because of public transportation, walkability and other services — and a handful live in New York City.

Dogs who do not prefer an urban setting can be paired with owners who tend not to be city-goers. Owners train alongside their dogs while boarding at the school for several weeks. Their stay culminates with the trip to Manhattan.

While not exactly a test, Manhattan’s conditions present the dogs with intense conditions that can help reveal training aspects to work on.

“It’s a training experience that offers more than anywhere else we can take them,” said Dave Johnson, director of instruction and training at the Seeing Eye. “Almost anything can happen in one day in New York — it’s a culmination of sensory overload, even for humans.”

The dogs partnered with Ms. Faul and Ms. Gee were handling it all pretty well. They wove through pedestrians like a slalom course. Like harried New Yorkers, the dogs seemed stymied by slow-walking tourists. They nudged up to them and waited for a narrow opening to lead their owners past.

Ms. Gee was helped by Ms. Oplinger as she tried to coax Ozma onto an escalator inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

“She’s so smooth about it,” said Ms. Gee, who began losing her vision in early childhood because of a genetic disorder.

Ms. Faul said she was happy with Innes’s confidence.

“You need to have that gumption,” said Ms. Faul, a retired computer programmer who lost her sight in a car accident while in college. “When I felt him go through those people, I knew he was a New Yorker.”

Ahead was a hot dog cart whose vendor was playing Middle Eastern music. Ms. Gee avoided the cart but hit her head on a plastic sign that was hanging off it. She circled Ozma back to remind him to see obstacles at eye level.

Guiding Eyes For the Blind, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., in Westchester County, and the Guide Dog Foundation in Smithtown, N.Y., on Long Island, also train dogs in Manhattan.

Many other schools train dogs in urban environments. But New York stands apart, said Marion Gwizdala, president of the National Association of Guide Dog Users. “Most cities,” he said, “don’t have the hustle and bustle of Midtown Manhattan.”

The dogs receive four months of training at the Seeing Eye, a guide dog school in Morristown, N.J., learning to navigate around obstacles and obey commands, as well as street-crossing skills.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

Even for dogs and owners who do not visit cities, urban training can help prepare them for chaotic situations, such as shopping malls or carnivals, he added.

As Ms. Faul and Ms. Gee headed along Seventh Avenue, the dogs guided them around scaffolding supports that partially blocked sidewalks and around a work zone. The dogs looped around a Coca-Cola truck blocking a crosswalk and later avoided a yellow cab that swooped around a corner toward them.

There were moments for instruction, too, as when Innes suddenly made a sharp right — toward the open door of a perfume store. The dogs would soon get used to such distractions, Ms. DeMarco said. For now, Ms. Faul pulled him back on course.

As visual as Times Square is, with its billboards and swarm of activity, Ms. Faul said that its aural energy was also impressive.

“I feel like I’m in a carnival city,” she said. “All the noise, all the beeps, all the people, the different languages you hear. The noise echoes off the buildings. It’s like being at Mardi Gras. Crowds of people everywhere.”

They walked by the TKTS booth selling theater tickets and headed past Broadway theaters. Ms. Gee praised the way Ozma ignored the blaring sirens and kept her away from creeping tour buses and rumbling dump trucks.

“She seems to focus even better in the chaos,” she said, adding that there was only one problem.

“She’s going to be disappointed when we go home.”

[theramseyloft]

Do you think pigeon races are ethical? I haven't heard a lot about them, and what I have heard from palomacy might be biased. So I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Sooo, that's sort of a complex question.

I'd have to say pigeon racing is as ethical as marathon dog sledding.

It is culturally important.

The cold, inhospitable parts of the world could not have been explored or colonized without sled dogs.

In the US, and a LOT of Europe and the Middle East, cities owe the coordination of connecting eachother with roads to messenger pigeons, and the millitary only stopped prinarily using them to communicate from the field to the nearest base avout 70 years ago, and only because that's when phone lines caught up to and surpassed the speed and reliabilty of pigeon borne messages.

There are still places in the world where dog sleds are the safest, most reliable mode of transportation, and there are still places where messenger pigeons are the fastest, most reliable means of communication.

The skill to breed and train those animals to peeform those duties may be needed again at some point, which means animals from established blood lines bred and trained to those tasks may be vital for us again at some point.

In both sports, there is significant risk to the animals involved that they have no way of consenting to.

Dogs can freeze, injure themselves, starve if insufficient rations were packed, and be attacked by wild animals.

Racing homers can be blown off course in inclement weather, crash out hungry if given insufficient callories to burn on the flight home (racers have had the instinct to stop and eat on the way home bred out of them. They do NOT stop flying until they get home or run out of light, and once their stomach empties, their bodies break down and digest their own muscle for fuel. If they take more than three days to get back, their flight muscles atrophy so far that they will drop out of the sky, too weak to fly.) , be struck by a hawk, or just get lost.

There are ways to mittigate these risks.

Intensive, careful endurance training to build up their stamina in a way the dogs enjoy. Shoes to protect their pads. Spike collars to protect their necks. Sturdy camping equipment, plenty of good rations, their handler knowing when to rest them and let them refuel.

Pigeon racers also intensively endutance train from the time their birds can fly.

Training tosses start very close to home, moving a little farther away every time to build the birds stamina and navigation skills up.

A good racer will not let them get malnourished, will let them fill up on a fatty meal like peanuts before a race, and won't race them at a greater distance than thry are built for.

No amount of precautions will fully, or even mostly erase the inherent risks to the individual animals made to perform.

Just as the statement thar society may need these services again and cannot afford to risk completely losing them is true, it is equally true that each of the individual animals (the pigeons MANY times more severely than the dogs!!) lives are knowingly and willingly risked by their owners in EVERY. SINGLE. Training session.

We needed it in the past.

We may need it again

But there is no way to completely, or in the pigeons' case even MOSTLY, protecting the animals involved from the unavoidable dangers inherant in racing.

It's complicated.