Edited to be less confusing.
Aug. 10th, 2017 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yourtinseltinkerbellvia http://ift.tt/2vqv6Gz:
elodieunderglass:
ramseyringnecks:
quousque:
ramseyringnecks:
Why should rescued pigeons and doves not be released back into the wild? And why do they need to be handled in the rescues and humans should imprint on them unlike other birds? I’m writing a paper on rescued pigeons and doves if you’re wondering XD
ramseyringnecks answered:
First and foremost because they are not wild animals.
They are the children of lost and abandoned domestic pets. Mostly performance breeds like homers, rollers, tumblers, tipplers and sky cutters, with the occasional escaped or abandoned fancy mixed in.
What would your reaction be to a person taking a young dog they found in an alley or parking lot, worming it, bringing it back from emaciation or disease, maybe treating a broken bone or car injury, and then taking it right back and releasing it into the wild once they got it healthy?
Would you object?
Why?
Really. List all the reasons. Because I guarantee that all of them except rabies apply to pigeons.
Never seen a healthy stray dog? I can guarantee you that you’ve never seen a healthy stray pigeon either.
The streaked white poo you always see on buildings or sidewalks under pigeon roosts?
Its an indicator of starvation.
Healthy poo is brown, round, and solid with a small white urate.
White poo is pure uric acid, with little to no food matter, whick is why it does the structural damage it does.
The cute poofball pose? They are cold, and most are hunched up in the universal posture of “I don’t feel so good…”
Being malnourished and usually heavily parisitized makes it hard to keep enough muscle mass to thermoregulate.
On mobile, I can’t see the question anymore once I start to answer it, so if I missed anything, I’ll reblog with more detail.
Ok. Looks like I have missed a few things.
Rescues and imprinting.
So, alluding to dogs again because pigeons have been domesticated AT LEAST as long and as completely as Dogs.
Imagine if, after all of the time Humanity has spent with Dogs, training them to work with us as partners, companions, therapy, and service animals; Society suddenly fell out of love with dogs and abandoned them completely, except for races and shows, where any non feral puppies born that could not be expected to win or produce winners were immediately killed.
That is exactly what happened to pigeons.
50 years ago.
Really. Just fifty years.
And dogs, who are still VERY much societally beloved as companions and in rolls of service, need rescues.
Because people refuse to spay and neuter their house pets, and more puppies are born than there are homes for, there is a stray population of unwanted dogs that breed uncontrolled.
And the reason feral dogs don’t have NEARLY the population of feral pigeons? SO many people respond SO fast to the sight of a lost, sick puppy or dog!
It’s just an automatic knee-jerk reaction for most people to at least network on behalf of a stray dog to get it somewhere safe and either reunite it with its owner, or find it a permanent home.
After all, we KNOW dogs are pets! If a dog is wandering unattended, something must be wrong, and it is automatically assumed to need help, no matter how healthy it looks at first glance.
Now, imagine if NO one EVER did that for ANY stray dog, over a period of 50 years, and now you know why there is such an overwhelming number of feral pigeons.
You may find the occasional purebred in a shelter, but I can pretty much guarantee that was a pet 9 times out of 10, whose owner either died or suffered some misfortune and had no other option. (Mill busts aside.)
Like I said in a previous ask, when animals are bred on purpose, there has to *be* a purpose. There must be a goal AND a plan for EVERY single litter.
If you boil it down, THAT is what separates an Ethical breeder from a Mill.
Ethical breeders have a SPECIFIC goal for a litter and have preparations set up for the rest of the pups.
Space to house them long term, resources set aside for food and medical care, time set aside to train and socialize them, and a fee and screening process set up to make the best possible match between a pup and a family, and a return policy in case things don’t work out, in order to ensure that there is the least possible likelihood of any of those puppies winding up abandoned.
Pigeons, because of the smear campaign against them 50 years ago (http://ift.tt/2nUZOFi) no longer have the overwhelming public support with which Dogs are almost universally blessed.
Pigeons are either purebred show birds, purebred performers, or feral.
There are SO few pigeons blessed to be house companions.
Humanity has largely forgotten that they ARE domesticated.
There are SO few places even willing to look at them.
Wildlife rehabs are up to their eyes in DOMESTICATED birds that really should be in pet shelters. If pigeons were not constantly mistaken for wild animals, imagine how much funding and resources could be freed up for genuinely native wildlife!
While ADULT feral pigeons can survive release back “into the wild”, babies ALL almost immediately die upon release.
Pigeons are very human like in just HOW socially complex they are. Babies have to be TAUGHT how to pigeon!
Not just where and how to forage, but how to respect the spaces of older flock mates so that they can make and defend their own space with in the flock.
With out that knowledge, which humans are just not equipped to teach, baby pigeons will never be accepted into a flock.
Pigeon flocks are extended families. Strangers are competitors for limited resources and can only join a flock by marrying in.
Alone, they can’t survive. Feral flocks depend on cooperation to eat, drink, gather nest materials, and avoid predation. With no one to watch their back, a single pidge is under constant stress trying to feed itself and keep watch for predators at the same time. It steadily weakens, and dies of disease if it manages not to get eaten first.
Because of this, I make absolutely NO attempt to release any baby pigeons I get through wildlife rehab.
It would literally be dumping a stray puppy back into the alley or on the road side.
They ARE domestic pets. It is a fact.
And they deserve to be treated like it.
So the few shelters there are that accept them make it their life’s mission to remind humanity that PIGEONS ARE ABANDONED SKY PUPPIES!
OF COURSE THEY CAN BE GREAT COMPANIONS!
THAT IS WHAT THEY HAVE *ALWAYS* BEEN!
Now, let’s touch on imprinting.
The difference between pigeons and exotic birds isn’t that it’s ok to imprint pigeons, but not exotics.
It’s that pigeons do not NEED to be imprinted in order to be safely tractable.
Parrots are not domesticated.
The tame ones are imprinted. They *have* to think of humans as parents and potential mates, or they will see us as predators and can inflict potentially crippling injuries in self defense.
Pigeons are genuinely domesticated, and have been since the dawn of written history. They are *hatched* already tame and do not have to be stolen and bottle fed to be safe to handle or capable of bonding as a companion to a person. Like puppies, pigeon babies only need to be socialized as they grow up in order to bond easily to people.
Oh!
Sorry.
I missed what you were actually asking in regards to imprinting!
You asked why baby pigeons in shelters NEED to be handled!
It’s because pigeons are intensely social. Babies and hens are VERY touch oriented, to the extent that they suffer touch starvation the way human toddlers do.
Baby Pigeons grow up in a cuddle puddle, constantly snuggled and verbally soothed by both parents until they wean.
They usually don’t even leave the flock after weaning. They become part of it, like a village made up of a huge, extended family; Nesting next door to or across the way from their parents and siblings, rather than going off on their own to claim an entirely separate territory.
Mater of fact, young birds ONLY have to leave and start a new flock when the one they hatched in grows too large for local resources to support.
Wild animals in rehab need to be handled as little as possible to avoid imprinting, so that they are not hindered in their survival upon release.
Pigeons are NOT wild animals. They are not even native to anywhere but Turkey and neighboring parts of the middle east.
They are domesticated pets. Imprinting avoidance should not apply to them.
why did we domesticate pigeons? What did we use them for? Why did we suddenly decide we didn’t need them anymore?
I touched on pigeon domestication in another post, but here it is again.
Columba livia is native to Turkey, and neighboring parts of the middle east, where the unaltered wild population nests in desert cliff faces usually near the sea.
Being grain eaters in a desert, they have to range a very long way to find food and water, and then they have to be able to find their way BACK to very unique and specific nesting grounds.
If you were lost in the middle eastern desert and lucky enough to find a pigeon, you were saved! During the day, you could follow it to water. At dusk, you could follow it back to the safest shelter available.
Thus, Doves, the ROCK DOVE initially, became known as messengers of God.
Guanno so nutritious that crops could be grown damn near ANYWHERE with it made pigeons such valuable partners that they were practically sacred.
Weaned peeps, able to self feed but not to fly, could be taken from their nest to a man made DoveCote. Pigeons, being SO social, tamed easily and when they could fly, left to forage like the wild ones, but came back to the man made Cotes for their superior protection, brought mates, and raised squeaks of their own.
The only type of livestock that did not have to be fed, you could not be too poor to own pigeons.
They were more valued for their poop than meat or eggs, but the meat and eggs are good, and if harvested rarely and only at night, the rest of the flock never came to see their protector as a part time predator. Over time, they grew more and more docile.
Because they still foraged for themselves, the least cunning birds slowest to calculate and least agile fell prey most easily to predators while out away from the Cote. Selection favored the most intelligent, and there was no benefit in selecting away from it artificially.
Pigeons, as a result, are almost alarmingly human in their level of cognitive capacity!
Tapping into their homing ability, we used them as messengers. Pigeons taken from their home loft could fly back from almost anywhere, so there were pigeon lofts in EVERY military out post, a loft serving towns, and the particularly wealthy could have a personal messenger loft.
Messenger pigeons, selectively bred for navigational accuracy and speed, were used in Greece to send word of Olympic winners. In Rome to send news of battle and ask for reinforcements or supplies.
Messenger pigeons were the FASTEST way to send news over long distance. Not only were they required to coordinate infrastructure between settlements, pigeons were the standard against which the speed of phone lines and internet were measured while they were being developed.
When the military considered them obsolete was the beginning of our falling out of love with them, but people still generally liked and respected pigeons until they became likened to rats and associated with filth and disease.
The Rats with Wings thing really fucked them over, and 50 years later, our once very close partnership with them has all but been wiped from public consciousness.
I am so excited to see Pigeon Discourse continuing! Seriously, nothing makes me happier. I hope that everyone looks at the beautiful and diverse pigeons on the street and says “wow, look at you guys, thanks for being such great friends!”
(Your picture was not posted)
elodieunderglass:
ramseyringnecks:
quousque:
ramseyringnecks:
Why should rescued pigeons and doves not be released back into the wild? And why do they need to be handled in the rescues and humans should imprint on them unlike other birds? I’m writing a paper on rescued pigeons and doves if you’re wondering XD
ramseyringnecks answered:
First and foremost because they are not wild animals.
They are the children of lost and abandoned domestic pets. Mostly performance breeds like homers, rollers, tumblers, tipplers and sky cutters, with the occasional escaped or abandoned fancy mixed in.
What would your reaction be to a person taking a young dog they found in an alley or parking lot, worming it, bringing it back from emaciation or disease, maybe treating a broken bone or car injury, and then taking it right back and releasing it into the wild once they got it healthy?
Would you object?
Why?
Really. List all the reasons. Because I guarantee that all of them except rabies apply to pigeons.
Never seen a healthy stray dog? I can guarantee you that you’ve never seen a healthy stray pigeon either.
The streaked white poo you always see on buildings or sidewalks under pigeon roosts?
Its an indicator of starvation.
Healthy poo is brown, round, and solid with a small white urate.
White poo is pure uric acid, with little to no food matter, whick is why it does the structural damage it does.
The cute poofball pose? They are cold, and most are hunched up in the universal posture of “I don’t feel so good…”
Being malnourished and usually heavily parisitized makes it hard to keep enough muscle mass to thermoregulate.
On mobile, I can’t see the question anymore once I start to answer it, so if I missed anything, I’ll reblog with more detail.
Ok. Looks like I have missed a few things.
Rescues and imprinting.
So, alluding to dogs again because pigeons have been domesticated AT LEAST as long and as completely as Dogs.
Imagine if, after all of the time Humanity has spent with Dogs, training them to work with us as partners, companions, therapy, and service animals; Society suddenly fell out of love with dogs and abandoned them completely, except for races and shows, where any non feral puppies born that could not be expected to win or produce winners were immediately killed.
That is exactly what happened to pigeons.
50 years ago.
Really. Just fifty years.
And dogs, who are still VERY much societally beloved as companions and in rolls of service, need rescues.
Because people refuse to spay and neuter their house pets, and more puppies are born than there are homes for, there is a stray population of unwanted dogs that breed uncontrolled.
And the reason feral dogs don’t have NEARLY the population of feral pigeons? SO many people respond SO fast to the sight of a lost, sick puppy or dog!
It’s just an automatic knee-jerk reaction for most people to at least network on behalf of a stray dog to get it somewhere safe and either reunite it with its owner, or find it a permanent home.
After all, we KNOW dogs are pets! If a dog is wandering unattended, something must be wrong, and it is automatically assumed to need help, no matter how healthy it looks at first glance.
Now, imagine if NO one EVER did that for ANY stray dog, over a period of 50 years, and now you know why there is such an overwhelming number of feral pigeons.
You may find the occasional purebred in a shelter, but I can pretty much guarantee that was a pet 9 times out of 10, whose owner either died or suffered some misfortune and had no other option. (Mill busts aside.)
Like I said in a previous ask, when animals are bred on purpose, there has to *be* a purpose. There must be a goal AND a plan for EVERY single litter.
If you boil it down, THAT is what separates an Ethical breeder from a Mill.
Ethical breeders have a SPECIFIC goal for a litter and have preparations set up for the rest of the pups.
Space to house them long term, resources set aside for food and medical care, time set aside to train and socialize them, and a fee and screening process set up to make the best possible match between a pup and a family, and a return policy in case things don’t work out, in order to ensure that there is the least possible likelihood of any of those puppies winding up abandoned.
Pigeons, because of the smear campaign against them 50 years ago (http://ift.tt/2nUZOFi) no longer have the overwhelming public support with which Dogs are almost universally blessed.
Pigeons are either purebred show birds, purebred performers, or feral.
There are SO few pigeons blessed to be house companions.
Humanity has largely forgotten that they ARE domesticated.
There are SO few places even willing to look at them.
Wildlife rehabs are up to their eyes in DOMESTICATED birds that really should be in pet shelters. If pigeons were not constantly mistaken for wild animals, imagine how much funding and resources could be freed up for genuinely native wildlife!
While ADULT feral pigeons can survive release back “into the wild”, babies ALL almost immediately die upon release.
Pigeons are very human like in just HOW socially complex they are. Babies have to be TAUGHT how to pigeon!
Not just where and how to forage, but how to respect the spaces of older flock mates so that they can make and defend their own space with in the flock.
With out that knowledge, which humans are just not equipped to teach, baby pigeons will never be accepted into a flock.
Pigeon flocks are extended families. Strangers are competitors for limited resources and can only join a flock by marrying in.
Alone, they can’t survive. Feral flocks depend on cooperation to eat, drink, gather nest materials, and avoid predation. With no one to watch their back, a single pidge is under constant stress trying to feed itself and keep watch for predators at the same time. It steadily weakens, and dies of disease if it manages not to get eaten first.
Because of this, I make absolutely NO attempt to release any baby pigeons I get through wildlife rehab.
It would literally be dumping a stray puppy back into the alley or on the road side.
They ARE domestic pets. It is a fact.
And they deserve to be treated like it.
So the few shelters there are that accept them make it their life’s mission to remind humanity that PIGEONS ARE ABANDONED SKY PUPPIES!
OF COURSE THEY CAN BE GREAT COMPANIONS!
THAT IS WHAT THEY HAVE *ALWAYS* BEEN!
Now, let’s touch on imprinting.
The difference between pigeons and exotic birds isn’t that it’s ok to imprint pigeons, but not exotics.
It’s that pigeons do not NEED to be imprinted in order to be safely tractable.
Parrots are not domesticated.
The tame ones are imprinted. They *have* to think of humans as parents and potential mates, or they will see us as predators and can inflict potentially crippling injuries in self defense.
Pigeons are genuinely domesticated, and have been since the dawn of written history. They are *hatched* already tame and do not have to be stolen and bottle fed to be safe to handle or capable of bonding as a companion to a person. Like puppies, pigeon babies only need to be socialized as they grow up in order to bond easily to people.
Oh!
Sorry.
I missed what you were actually asking in regards to imprinting!
You asked why baby pigeons in shelters NEED to be handled!
It’s because pigeons are intensely social. Babies and hens are VERY touch oriented, to the extent that they suffer touch starvation the way human toddlers do.
Baby Pigeons grow up in a cuddle puddle, constantly snuggled and verbally soothed by both parents until they wean.
They usually don’t even leave the flock after weaning. They become part of it, like a village made up of a huge, extended family; Nesting next door to or across the way from their parents and siblings, rather than going off on their own to claim an entirely separate territory.
Mater of fact, young birds ONLY have to leave and start a new flock when the one they hatched in grows too large for local resources to support.
Wild animals in rehab need to be handled as little as possible to avoid imprinting, so that they are not hindered in their survival upon release.
Pigeons are NOT wild animals. They are not even native to anywhere but Turkey and neighboring parts of the middle east.
They are domesticated pets. Imprinting avoidance should not apply to them.
why did we domesticate pigeons? What did we use them for? Why did we suddenly decide we didn’t need them anymore?
I touched on pigeon domestication in another post, but here it is again.
Columba livia is native to Turkey, and neighboring parts of the middle east, where the unaltered wild population nests in desert cliff faces usually near the sea.
Being grain eaters in a desert, they have to range a very long way to find food and water, and then they have to be able to find their way BACK to very unique and specific nesting grounds.
If you were lost in the middle eastern desert and lucky enough to find a pigeon, you were saved! During the day, you could follow it to water. At dusk, you could follow it back to the safest shelter available.
Thus, Doves, the ROCK DOVE initially, became known as messengers of God.
Guanno so nutritious that crops could be grown damn near ANYWHERE with it made pigeons such valuable partners that they were practically sacred.
Weaned peeps, able to self feed but not to fly, could be taken from their nest to a man made DoveCote. Pigeons, being SO social, tamed easily and when they could fly, left to forage like the wild ones, but came back to the man made Cotes for their superior protection, brought mates, and raised squeaks of their own.
The only type of livestock that did not have to be fed, you could not be too poor to own pigeons.
They were more valued for their poop than meat or eggs, but the meat and eggs are good, and if harvested rarely and only at night, the rest of the flock never came to see their protector as a part time predator. Over time, they grew more and more docile.
Because they still foraged for themselves, the least cunning birds slowest to calculate and least agile fell prey most easily to predators while out away from the Cote. Selection favored the most intelligent, and there was no benefit in selecting away from it artificially.
Pigeons, as a result, are almost alarmingly human in their level of cognitive capacity!
Tapping into their homing ability, we used them as messengers. Pigeons taken from their home loft could fly back from almost anywhere, so there were pigeon lofts in EVERY military out post, a loft serving towns, and the particularly wealthy could have a personal messenger loft.
Messenger pigeons, selectively bred for navigational accuracy and speed, were used in Greece to send word of Olympic winners. In Rome to send news of battle and ask for reinforcements or supplies.
Messenger pigeons were the FASTEST way to send news over long distance. Not only were they required to coordinate infrastructure between settlements, pigeons were the standard against which the speed of phone lines and internet were measured while they were being developed.
When the military considered them obsolete was the beginning of our falling out of love with them, but people still generally liked and respected pigeons until they became likened to rats and associated with filth and disease.
The Rats with Wings thing really fucked them over, and 50 years later, our once very close partnership with them has all but been wiped from public consciousness.
I am so excited to see Pigeon Discourse continuing! Seriously, nothing makes me happier. I hope that everyone looks at the beautiful and diverse pigeons on the street and says “wow, look at you guys, thanks for being such great friends!”
(Your picture was not posted)