Feral pigeons and the London Pigeon String Foot and Rescue group
bbc.com
bbc.com
Put in that context it’s rather sad.
"Flying rats". OK so what is wrong with rats? They often perform a initial clean up role and live blameless lives, if we want to think of them in a positive way - they don't care. Rats and many other "pests" tend to get "out of control" thanks to mostly human interventions: dumping waste inappropriately and the like.
(1) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-17138...
I think they are amazing, and as you say they were once integral to our lives, now just a pest.
We raised roller pigeons after a pair showed up at our farm. They obviously escaped from somewhere, as they were red and tame. Until we knew what they were, we assumed there was something wrong with them, as they couldn't fly without doing loops and flips. That's what they're bred to do.
And they're delicious, as a side note. . .
I wonder what a humane method of population control looks like?
Pigeon feeding can lead to rats so it seems reasonable to ban that.
That'll also prevent at least the particular pigeons nesting there from building nests in other, more annoying locations, and when kept clean decreases the chance of spreading diseases both among themselves and to humans (bird flu, for example).
Some other methods of decreasing their unnecessary suffering is to just generally keep cities clean (hopefully an easy win-win?), especially of human hair: Apparently barbers and hairdressers sweeping hair cuttings out into the street are a main reason for pigeons slowly and painfully losing their toes or entire feet.
It’ll be a couple of sticks just plonked on a ledge. They can be very proud of their nests and after the 9 seconds of effort put into the job, who’s to blame them?
At least I don't have head pigeons.
I remember doing predator-prey models at uni. The issue is that the population will just grow until it’s at some kind of capacity. Cats are easier to capture and spay, but an issue there is that for every cat that lives longer, many thousands of native animals are going to die. But the cat is cuter and visible, so we help it.
For eg pigeons, what limits the population? You can’t capture and neuter every bird, so population restriction is environmental. If you add food, rather than 1000 birds you now have 1100 birds, etc. Ideally we’re being kind to a balanced population of birds that play some part in the local ecosystem, rather than one that we created and out-competes other birds because we give it a hand.
Not an expert. Experts, what’s the best outcome here?
Edit: emigrated to Sydney. Took 3 moggies with us at great expense but they’re now inside cats so we don’t annihilate the local wildlife and irritate all the neighbours (who are rightfully very protective of their native animals). Cats are happy. A friend’s mom looked after about 17 feral kittens. Now 17 grown cats that eat a lot of food made of presumably gentle cows. This is not well-thought out. But kittens are cute and have utterly hacked humans.
Not an expert myself but here in Germany people build pigeon shelters and swap out the eggs with fake eggs.
While cats do indeed kill wildlife, I suspect that "thousands of animals per year" is a big exaggeration even for ferals. It might be true if their sole diet was wildlife, but in most cases the diet will include a lot of contributions from humans (from people who like cats, scavenging in bins, and occasionally, theft). And of course almost all of the wildlife they do take will be mice, which is the original reason we live with cats. Even today, if a cat near you is taking thousands of mice per year, few people would prefer to live with thousands of mice.
Pet cats, of course, don't take anything like this number. I've seen figures of <5 per year, and that's consistent with my own cats.
“Cats have played a leading role in most of Australia’s 34 mammal extinctions since 1788, and are a big reason populations of at least 123 other threatened native species are dropping.
But pet cats are wreaking havoc too. Our new analysis compiles the results of 66 different studies on pet cats to gauge the impact of Australia’s pet cat population on Australia’s wildlife.
On average, each roaming pet cat kills 186 reptiles, birds and mammals per year, most of them native to Australia”
https://www.nespthreatenedspecies.edu.au/news-and-media/late...
“scientific evidence does not support the popular use of cats to control urban rat populations, and ecologists oppose their use for this purpose because of the disproportionate harm they do to native wildlife”
“Surveys of cat owners find they often view the depredation of wildlife as a normal thing that cats do, and rarely feel an individual obligation to prevent it.[55] They may experience some level of cognitive dissonance toward the subject, because when surveyed they're more likely than the general public to believe that cat predation isn't harmful to wildlife”
I think it's safe to say that the number of animals killed by pet cats is disputed. It will also be quite different in different places; my figures come from my area. The situation is also very different in Australia, where cats are a recent introduction, and the native population is naive to them, versus countries where this is not the case. I certainly don't defend letting cats outside in Australia or New Zealand.
In other places it's more a question about equilibrium. All wild animals die, either from predation, starvation, or disease; predation may not be the worse death. Nor is predation necessarily a sign of disequilibrium (IE, cats causing a falling wildlife population) - at equilibrium it's still possible for 100% of deaths to be by predation, as the older animals get slower and are predated. The exact effect of pet cats is therefore quite involved, and counting the number of kills won't tell you the whole picture even if you could get that figure.
If cats weren’t there, native animals would be doing the predation. We enable cats to out-compete other animals. Islands make it easier to measure the impact but obviously this plays out similarly in all places. We like cats, help them where we can, have devoted much of our internet bandwidth to them, and there’s no way that is a positive for other animals in the ecosystem. The level of impact is debatable but it’s not anywhere near positive.
I lived in South Africa. Tons of cats in cities and very few species of birds. Go to a reserve with “proper” wildlife and there are tons of bird species and no cats. They’re utterly out-competed when the playing field is level.
Going back to the article, if we feed pigeons they’ll increase in number until we get a new equilibrium. So our current state isn’t an act of god, and by doing more of the same we’ll just exacerbate the problem. Humane management is surely a better idea, like the fake eggs approach described by another commenter. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40771093)
Cats unfortunately catch and kill prey even when they have enough to eat. Their hunting instincts aren't wired to the feeling of hunger.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/magazine/15pigeons.html
My take from that is the Pigeon population is a function of the food supply, so to reduce the pigeon population you reduce the food. Which includes that supplied by the Pigeon lovers.
When I was a kid (in Cairo) my father let me keep a small pigeon coop on the roof. We'd buy a few, then you have to keep them locked in the coop for a couple weeks so that they "home" there. After that, they'd be allowed to leave and fly wherever they'd like, and they'd always come back to the coop to nest at night. You'd feed them once a day or so by throwing some grain on the floor outside the coop, and they'd learn to associate a cue (like waving a flag) with feeding time and fly back to eat.
That said, I could never bring myself to eat them (not because of disgust, but just because at that point they felt like pets).
There are quaint old picturesque dovecotes in a lot of historic places ... those were for harvesting the squabs, to turn into pies. On reflection I think this was a reasonable arrangement for keeping things in balance (a modest proposal, even).
I would not mind them as much if they did not shit everywhere.