Why do people persecute city
pigeons?
46 minutes ago
By Zaria Gorvett, @ZariaGorvett,
Getty Images
Feral pigeons were made by humans. Now we detest them.
How did things go so wrong?
*This article contains
details and images that
some readers may find
distressing.
I'm perched on the edge of
a paving slab, watching as
Lisa Davies produces a
baby-pink manicure set
from her rucksack, and
opens it up on her lap. Inside
is an assortment of tweezers and nail files, as well as a mysterious
spoon that I've since learned is an ear pick. Like a surgeon arranging
her instruments before an operation, she runs her hands over them,
and selects a pair of nail scissors.
It's a hot, sticky Sunday afternoon at St Anne's churchyard, in London's
Soho district. Groups of teenagers are lounging on the grass, while
shirtless men play table tennis in the background. But further into the
park, a less typical summer scene is unfolding. A group of volunteers is
clustered around a flock of 50 pigeons, watching their feet intently.
One is limping.
The young pigeon's feet are swollen, bound up in a tangle of long, dark
human hairs and cotton threads – the detritus of city life, picked up
over many months of walking alongside pedestrians. This is a classic
case of "string foot", and without human help, it will gradually cut off
the blood supply to her toes and feet, until they fall off altogether. But
she is one of the lucky ones. With impressive confidence and precision,
Davies – a part-time student studying conservation education at the
University of Chester, who has been volunteering with pigeons for the
last 18 months – thrusts her arms forward and gently plucks the bird
from the crowd. She secures it under her t-shirt which, fittingly,
features a pigeon print, and pulls out a dinosaur-like foot. It takes
around half an hour of careful tugging and snipping before the hairs
have been removed, and the bird can be released in a flurry of
feathers.
Davies is part of the London Pigeon String Foot and Rescue group, an
organisation that aims to help the city's approximately three million
feral pigeons. The volunteers meet up every Sunday, all year long, to
tend to the mangled feet of pigeons across the city. As I ponder this
noble sacrifice, I'm snapped out of my reverie by a commotion – on the
street below, a man is chasing a pigeon "for a joke", sending a tempest
of panicked birds into the air.
City pigeons are among the most detested animals on the planet. After
a series of misunderstandings going back decades, they've become
widely regarded as dirty, disease-addled and akin to "flying rats".
Horrific injuries are often accepted as a consequence of their
desperate, downtrodden existence, and their penchant for life
alongside humans is sometimes resented as annoying or unhygienic.
But it hasn't always been this way. For millennia, pigeons were viewed
with respect and even reverence. One Mughal emperor was such a big
fan, he carted around 20,000 of the birds wherever he went, while the
Victorian scientist Charles Darwin – who at one point had a flock of
90 – was reportedly obsessed with them. How did our relationship with
these creatures go so wrong?
Zaria Gorvett
Many volunteers carry their pigeon de-stringing tools with them at all times,
in case they happen upon a pigeon that needs help
A parallel existence
Along the rocky coastline in the Outer
Hebrides, perched on top of cliffs
and abandoned buildings, are familiar
faces: grey heads with large orange eyes,
peeking down at passersby. They belong
to rock doves, Columba livia. But though
these birds look almost identical to the
feral pigeons found in cities, they are not
the same. This remote Scottish outpost has one of the wildest
populations of rock doves on the planet – it's one of the last places
where they have clung onto a substantial proportion of their original,
ancestral genetics.
Feral pigeons, on the other hand, are an entirely different case. They
belong to the subspecies Columba livia domestica, and are almost
exclusively descended from domesticated birds, which have provided
a steady trickle of escapees to hang around human settlements over
the last 4,000 years. There are subtle variations in the ancestry of
populations from one region to another, depending on the specific
breeds traditionally kept in that part of the world – but at some point,
the family tree of the vast majority of feral pigeons would lead back to
birds bred by humans.
As a result of this lineage, feral pigeons are extraordinarily trusting of
humans, and drawn to environments with a high density of people.
Paul Themis, known among the wildlife rescue community as Paul
Leous Pigeon, is a pigeon rehabilitator from London. He has been
helping pigeons in the city for the last 17 years, and co-founded the
London Pigeon String Foot and Rescue group five years ago. So far he
estimates that he has rescued more than 1,000 pigeons, and he now
lives with at least 20 former patients – he won't tell me exactly how
many – who roam free around his house.
Themis has rehabilitated both wild and feral pigeons over the years,
and explains that there's striking difference in their behaviour. Take
the common wood pigeon – a large, handsome bird with white and
iridescent green splodges on its neck, which inhabits parks, gardens
and woodland edges in the UK. The species is distinct from feral
pigeons, but they are close cousins – and they show how truly wild
pigeons view people.
Far from being stupid, pigeons can grasp abstract concepts such as time and
space (Credit: Paul Themis)
"When you catch them, they can almost have a heart attack, they're
so scared," says Themis. "They're just like every other wild bird." On
the other hand, "feral pigeons are so used to humans, some of them
are not even bothered if you pick them up."
Feral pigeons even have different biology. Just like chickens, these
domesticated birds breed more frequently than their wild counterparts
and produce more eggs per clutch.
In fact, the lives of feral pigeons are intimately linked to those of
people. They walk along human streets – they prefer to travel on foot –
take shelter in the cosy nooks created by human architecture and eat
scraps of human food. One study found that they tend to be drawn
to man-made structures and places with human activity, while habitats
more traditionally associated with wildlife, such as patches of dense
forest, actively deter them.
As seed-eaters eking out a living in an urban world of concrete and
steel, it can be challenging for feral pigeons to find enough food, says
Themis. After a series of bans on pigeon feeding in London's Trafalgar
Square, beginning in 2007, government agency scientists confirmed to
the Evening Standard newspaper that several birds had starved to
death.
The feral pigeons that waddle and head-bob around the streets of
London, New York, Singapore, Cape Town, and other major global
cities were made by humans. They are utterly dependent on us. And
yet, we have rejected them.
As my Sunday afternoon with the London Pigeon String Foot and
Rescue group progresses, their activities receive reactions from
onlookers that range from bemused curiosity – "err, what are you
doing with that pigeon?" – to outright hostility. The volunteers are
constantly on alert for the next torrent of verbal abuse, particularly
when feeding pigeons, which many people object to.
Pigeons are unable to remove threads or human hairs from their own feet,
and tangles can easily escalate to deadly or debilitating proportions (Credit:
Paul Themis)
Meanwhile, examples of indifference or even cruelty abound. Human
pedestrians walk into pigeons as though they aren't there, forcing
whole flocks to fly out of the way. Children chase them, creating
feathery panics that some adults seem to view as an acceptable sport.
Themis, who also co-founded the animal welfare organisation London
Wildlife Protection in 2011, explains that given the widespread
prejudice against pigeons, rescuers are extremely careful who they ask
for help. Many vets will euthanise poorly or injured pigeons as a matter
of course, he says, though the birds are remarkably resilient; it's
common to see healthy pigeons that have lost both feet entirely. And
while the fire service often agrees to lend a hand where birds are
trapped in netting, Themis explains that getting permission from
building owners to extract the victims can be a diplomatic minefield.
A social mistake
Back in 2016, the irrational hatred that many people have for pigeons
got Verónica Sevillano thinking. Today Sevillano works as an assistant
professor of social and environmental psychology at Autónoma
University of Madrid. But at the time she was working with Susan Fiske,
a psychology professor at Princeton University, in New Jersey, who
studies how people form prejudices against certain social groups. The
researchers wondered: just as we have a clear, and usually flawed,
image of the typical characteristics of, say, English or American people,
could we have similar preconceptions about certain species of
animals?
Together Sevillano and Fiske found that this was indeed the case. Like
our views on different demographics of people, how animal species are
perceived is based on two traits: how competent they seem (i.e. what
their abilities are), and how warm they thought to be (i.e. how
favourable we deem their intentions towards us). In essence, we apply
the same rules of social judgement to pigeons that we do to people.
Unfortunately for pigeons, they tend to be seen as extremely low in
both. "We don't mind killing or persecuting these animals because the
dimensions of warmth and competence in this case are pretty, pretty
negative," says Sevillano.
Pigeons are devoted parents – the mother and father provide round-the-clock
care for their babies, and even feed them with a kind of milk .
Sevillano explains that it's important we are aware these underlying
beliefs are being applied automatically and contributing to our feelings
of contempt. This is especially true because, like the negative
stereotypes about other marginalised groups, the common perception
of pigeons is not based on reality.
As Themis explains, nearly every unfavourable assumption we hold
about pigeons is a myth.
Take the idea that feral pigeons are stupid. This is particularly easy to
refute, because they have been used extensively in behavioural
studies, which have uncovered some remarkable abilities. For a start,
pigeons have good memories: they can identify individual humans
by their facial features, and are able to recall the directions for a
particular journey for years after they have returned home.
Pigeons have complex inner lives and experiments have revealed that
they are even able to get their heads around concepts such as space
and time – a surprising feat given that they don't have a cerebral
cortex, the wrinkly outermost layer of the brain that humans use to
grasp such abstract ideas. More recently, scientists discovered that
domesticated pigeons solve certain problems in a similar way
to artificial intelligence algorithms, using trial and error to learn to
recognise patterns and predict the best solution to a given problem.
Paul Themis also rescued an albino crow, Albi, who was being bullied – by
other crows (Credit: Paul Themis)
However, if these lofty intellectual pursuits make pigeons seem
intimidating or unrelatable, we can rest assured that they do have
some flaws. One study found that the birds gamble in a similar way to
humans, falling into the familiar psychological trap of investing
in winning big, rather than winning more overall.
Themis says pigeons often remind him of dogs – they are intelligent,
sociable, and can be highly affectionate to people. In 2020, the animal
rights nonprofit Peta launched a campaign to rebrand pigeons as "sky
puppies", since they "poop in public, beg for food, and recognise
people who are nice to them".
Perhaps the most damaging accusation against pigeons is that they
are riddled with disease – but even here, the evidence does not stack
up. For one thing, they are highly resistant to bird flu. They rarely
catch the virus, and when they do, they tend to have low amounts in
their bodies.
Pigeons can carry some diseases with the potential to spread to
humans, though infections are relatively rare. One study found that,
between 1941 and 2004, there were just 207 reports of pathogens
transmitted from pigeons to humans – anywhere in the world. In all,
there were 13 recorded deaths. The true number may be higher, but it
would have to be off by several orders of magnitude to compete with
the scale of infections from other domesticated animals – particularly
some of those with more favourable reputations.
Feral pigeons can be extremely affectionate towards humans, and form
strong bonds with the people that care for them (Credit: Paul Themis)
According to the World Health Organization, there are around 59,000
cases of rabies in humans every year, 99% of which are transmitted
via dogs – and 100% of which are fatal. Even in countries without the
virus, it's thought that many other pathogens can be acquired from
dogs and cats, including the superbug MRSA. Given these
comparisons, Themis believes our squeamishness about pigeons is
misplaced.
An unexpected twist
One of the strangest things
about the current tendency to
villainise pigeons is that it's
relatively new.
Nadira Faber, a professor of
psychology at the University
of Bremen and researcher in
philosophy at the University
of Oxford, explains how
unfavourable attitudes towards pigeons could be interpreted as
speciesism – a form of discrimination based on the idea that some
species are morally superior to others. This psychological bias is
usually linked to the categories we sort different animals into, such as
"pet", "food", or "pest". However, Faber suggests that pigeons are an
interesting case.
If a string foot isn't treated in time, pigeons can lose whole toes or feet
(Credit: Zaria Gorvett)
Pigeons have long been associated with love, fertility, and heavenly
beauty, by cultures ranging from the Babylonians to the ancient
Greeks. In the 16th Century, the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great took
pigeon fancying to the next level, with a vast population that was
taught elaborate flying tricks such as somersaults and dramatic arcs.
In Victorian Britain, the creatures again gained prominence,
and pigeon clubs sprung up across the country – places where proud
hobbyists could exhibit strange, "fancy" breeds, such as the English
short-faced tumbler, with its squashed face and look of constant
surprise.
During World War Two, pigeons garnered yet more public appreciation.
In the UK, 32 of the most valiant pigeon-officers were awarded the
Dickin Medal, an animal analogue of the Victoria Cross. An American
pigeon, GI Joe, became famous across the world for his dramatic
rescue of an entire village. Even today, white doves are symbols
of peace and love the world over – while their close cousins are viewed
as vermin. "It is fascinating that the very same species can, depending
on the point in time and the culture we look at, be seen as belonging to
different categories," says Faber.
As my afternoon with the London pigeon rescue group winds down, we
turn onto a side street where people experiencing homelessness are
queueing for a meal from a charitable van. By now, the pigeon
volunteers have helped at least 11 birds, including one whose
blackened toe came off as it was being examined – leading to some
confusion about what should be done with this macabre artefact. (In
the end, someone claimed it for their collection).
We sit down on the kerb while a pigeon who was shuffling around with
both feet tied together is painstakingly untangled. The sun is beating
down, everyone is tired, and the job looks like it will take at least an
hour. But here the pigeons – and the rescue group – receive their best
reaction all day, from people who live in close proximity to them, on
London's streets. "You're angels," one homeless man beams at us,
while another shares his dinner with a gathering crowd of cooing birds.
DAY6