Humans created feral pigeons. We hate them now. What went wrong and why?
*Some readers may find some of the content and photographs in this article upsetting.
Lisa Davies pulls a baby-pink manicure kit out of her bag and opens it up on her lap as I sit on the edge of a concrete stone. There are many tweezers and nail files inside, along with an enigmatic spoon that I now know is an ear pick. She runs her hands over her equipment, choosing a pair of nail scissors, much like a surgeon preparing her tools before an operation.
It's a steamy, muggy Sunday afternoon in the Soho neighborhood of London at St. Anne's churchyard. Teens are hanging out on the grass in groups, while in the distance, shirtless guys are playing table tennis. However, a landscape that is less characteristic of summer is developing further into the park. Fifty pigeons have gathered around a group of volunteers who are closely observing the birds' feet. One is hobbling.
The juvenile pigeon's feet are bloated and entangled with long, black human hairs and cotton strands, which are the remnants of city life accumulated over many months of strolling beside people. Without medical assistance, this typical example of "string foot" would eventually sever the blood flow to her toes and feet, causing them to fall off completely. However, she is among the fortunate ones. Impressively confident and precise, Davies, a University of Chester part-time student studying conservation education and a pigeon volunteer for the last eighteen months, reaches forward with her arms and gently plucks the bird from the throng. She tucks it beneath her pigeon-print t-shirt, appropriately enough, and takes out a dinosaur-like foot. After around thirty minutes of meticulous pulling and cutting, the bird's hairs will be removed, allowing it to be freed with a flurry of feathers.
Aiming to assist the roughly three million wild pigeons in the city, Davies is a member of the London Pigeon String Foot and Rescue organization. Every Sunday of the year, the volunteers get together to care to the injured feet of pigeons all across the city. A disturbance awakens me from my meditation while I'm thinking about this selfless sacrifice: a guy is pursuing a pigeon "for a joke" on the street below, driving a storm of scared birds upward.
One of the creatures that people hate the most on the earth is the city pigeon. They've been misunderstood for decades, and as a result, they're now often seen of as filthy, prone to illness, and like "flying rats". Horrible wounds are often tolerated as a result of their plight, and their preference for coexisting with people is sometimes seen as bothersome or unclean. However, things weren't always like this. Pigeons were revered and treated with respect for millennia. The Victorian scientist Charles Darwin, who once had a flock of ninety birds, was supposedly infatuated with them. Another Mughal emperor was such a devotee that he carried some twenty thousand of the birds with him wherever he went. How did things go so wrong in our interaction with these animals?
A separate existence
Grey heads with huge orange eyes may be seen peering down at onlookers from cliffs and abandoned structures dotting the rocky Outer Hebrides shoreline. They are a part of Columba livia, the rock doves. However, while having a nearly similar appearance to city-dwelling wild pigeons, these birds are not the same. One of the only locations where a significant amount of the rock doves' original, ancestral genetic makeup has survived is this isolated Scottish enclave, home to one of the planet's wildest populations of the bird.
Conversely, feral pigeons provide a very different situation. They are nearly entirely derived from domesticated birds, which over the last 4,000 years have given a continual flow of escaped birds to stay about human settlements. They belong to the subspecies Columba livia domestica. Depending on the particular breeds that have historically been raised in that area of the globe, populations' genealogy varies somewhat from place to place, but eventually, the great majority of feral pigeons can trace their lineage back to birds that were produced by humans.
Because of this heritage, feral pigeons are attracted to areas with a high population density and are very trusting of people.
Paul Themis is a London-based pigeon rehabilitator who goes as Paul Leous Pigeon in the animal rescue community. He co-founded the London Pigeon String Foot and Rescue organization five years ago and has been assisting pigeons in the city for the last seventeen years. He believes he has saved over a thousand pigeons so far, and he now has at least twenty former patients living with him (he won't say how many) that are allowed to fly about his home.
Over the years, Themis has rehabilitated both wild and feral pigeons, and she notes that there is a noticeable behavioral difference between the two. Consider the common wood pigeon, a huge, attractive bird that lives in UK parks, gardens, and forest margins. It has iridescent green and white splotches on its neck. Although they are not the same species as feral pigeons, they are near relatives and demonstrate the way that pigeons in the wild see humans.
However, "feral pigeons are so used to humans that some of them are not even bothered if you pick them up," adds Themis. "When you catch them, they can almost have a heart attack, they're so scared."
The biology of feral pigeons is even different from that of chickens; like chickens, these tamed birds reproduce more often and lay more eggs in a clutch than their wild counterparts.
The lives of feral pigeons are actually closely related to human lives; they travel on foot along human-made streets, seek refuge in cozy alcoves made by human architecture, and consume leftovers of human food. According to one study, feral pigeons are more likely to be drawn to areas with human activity and man-made structures than to habitats more typically associated with wildlife, like densely forested areas.
It can be difficult for feral pigeons to find enough food because they are seed-eaters struggling to survive in an urban environment of steel and concrete, according to Themis. Several birds have starved to death in London's Trafalgar Square as a result of repeated bans on pigeon feeding that began in 2007, according to government agency scientists who confirmed this to the Evening Standard newspaper.
people created the feral pigeons that wander aimlessly around the streets of major cities throughout the world, such as London, New York, Singapore, Cape Town, and so on. Despite their complete reliance on people, these birds have been rejected by humanity.
Observers' responses to the London Pigeon String Foot and Rescue group's Sunday afternoon activities vary from confused wonder to "err, what are you doing with that pigeon?"– to open hostility. The volunteers are always on the lookout for the next barrage of verbal abuse, especially when it comes to feeding pigeons, which a lot of people find objectionable.
While children pursue pigeons, causing fluffy panics that some adults appear to consider a legitimate sport, human pedestrians walk into pigeons as if they're not there, driving whole flocks to fly out of the way. Examples of cruelty or even apathy are everywhere.
Themis, who also co-founded the animal welfare organisation London Wildlife Protection in 2011, explains that because of the pervasive prejudice against pigeons, rescuers are very selective about who they seek assistance from. She also notes that although pigeons are remarkably resilient, many vets will euthanise poorly or injured birds; it's not uncommon to see healthy pigeons that have lost both feet entirely. Furthermore, although the fire brigade will often assist when birds become entangled in netting, Themis notes that obtaining permission from building owners to extract the victims can be difficult.
An error in society
In 2016, Verónica Sevillano—who is currently an assistant professor of social and environmental psychology at Autónoma University of Madrid—was struck by the irrational hatred that many people have for pigeons. At the time, Sevillano was working with Susan Fiske, a psychology professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, who specializes in studying how people form prejudices against certain social groups. The researchers wondered: given our clear and often flawed perceptions of the typical characteristics of, say, English or American people, could we have similar preconceptions about certain animal species?
Sevillano and Fiske together discovered that this was in fact the case. Similar to our opinions about various human demographics, our perceptions of animal species are based on two characteristics: our perceptions of their competence (i.e., their abilities) and our perceptions of their warmth (i.e., our perceptions of their intentions toward us). Essentially, we judge pigeons according to the same social standards as we do people.
"We don't mind killing or persecuting these animals because the dimensions of hospitality and expertise in this case are pretty, pretty negative," explains Sevillano. Regrettably, pigeons are often seen as exceedingly low in both.
As Sevillano points out, the common perception of pigeons is not grounded in reality, just like the negative stereotypes about other marginalised groups, so it's crucial that we recognise that these underlying beliefs are being applied automatically and adding to our feelings of contempt.
As Themis demonstrates, almost all of our negative beliefs about pigeons are untrue.
For example, it is very simple to disprove the notion that feral pigeons lack intelligence, as they have been the subject of numerous behavioral studies that have revealed some amazing skills. To begin with, pigeons have excellent memories; they can recognize specific humans based on their facial features and can remember the route for a given trip years after they have left for home.
The cerebral cortex, the wrinkled outermost layer of the brain that humans use to grasp such abstract ideas, is absent from pigeons, which explains their ability to comprehend concepts like space and time. More recently, scientists discovered that domesticated pigeons solve certain problems in a manner similar to artificial intelligence algorithms, using trial and error to learn to recognize patterns and predict the best solution to a given problem. Pigeons have complex inner lives.
Pigeons do, however, have some shortcomings; one study revealed that the birds gamble similarly to humans, falling into the well-known psychological trap of investing in winning big, rather than winning more overall. If these lofty academic interests make pigeons seem intimidating or unrelatable, we can rest assured that they are not perfect.
Themis claims that pigeons are intelligent, gregarious, and affectionate toward humans, much like dogs. In 2020, the animal rights organization Peta started a campaign to rename pigeons as "sky puppies" because they "poop in public, beg for food, and recognize people who are nice to them."
The most devastating charge made against pigeons is probably that they are disease-ridden, but even in this case, the evidence is weak. To start, pigeons are quite resistant to bird flu; when they do get the virus, it usually only affects small percentages of their bodies.
Although infections are relatively uncommon, pigeons can carry some diseases that have the potential to spread to humans. According to one study, between 1941 and 2004, there were only 207 reports of pathogens transmitted from pigeons to humans worldwide, resulting in 13 recorded deaths. The true number may be higher, but it would need to be significantly off to compete with the scale of infections from other domesticated animals, especially some with better reputations.
The World Health Organization estimates that there are approximately 59,000 human cases of rabies annually, 99% of which are spread by dogs and 100% of which are fatal. In addition, even in nations where the virus is not present, many other pathogens, including the superbug MRSA, are believed to be transmissible through dogs and cats. Based on these parallels, Themis thinks our fear of pigeons is unfounded.
A surprising turn of events
The fact that the present trend of demonizing pigeons is so recent is among its most peculiar aspects.
Professor of psychology at the University of Bremen and philosopher at the University of Oxford Nadira Faber explains that negative sentiments towards pigeons may be construed as speciesism, which is a kind of prejudice that stems from the belief that certain species are morally superior to others. Typically, this psychological bias is associated with the classifications we give different animals, like "pet," "food," or "pest," but Faber makes an intriguing argument for pigeons.
From the Babylonians to the ancient Greeks, pigeons have always been associated with love, fertility, as well as heavenly beauty. In the 16th century, the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great of England took pigeon fancying to a new level, training a large population to perform intricate flying manoeuvres like somersaults and dramatic arcs. The creatures gained popularity once more in Victorian Britain, where pigeon clubs sprang up all over the place, where proud hobbyists could display unusual, "fancy" breeds like the English short-faced tumbler, with its squashed face and expression of perpetual surprise.
Even today, white doves are representations of peace and love all over the world, while their close cousins are viewed as vermin. "It is captivating that the very same species can, depending upon the point in time and the culture we look at, be perceived as belonging to different categories," says Faber. During World War Two, pigeons garnered increasingly public appreciation. In the UK, 32 of the most valiant pigeon-officers were presented with the Dickin Medal, an animal analogue of the Victoria Cross.
The London Pigeon Rescue group is winding down my afternoon, and as we turn onto a side street, homeless people are waiting in line for food from a charity van. At this point, the pigeon volunteers have assisted at least 11 birds, one of which had a blackened toe that came off during examination, creating some confusion about what to do with this macabre artifact (in the end, someone claimed it for their collection).
Here, on the streets of London, the pigeons and the rescue group receive the best response of the day from locals: "You're angels," a homeless man beams at us, while another shares his dinner with a gathered group of cooing birds. The sun is beating down, people are tired, and it looks like the job will take at least an hour. While a pigeon, its two feet bound together, shuffles about, someone is laboriously untangling it. We settle down on the curb.
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