dogs and pigeons

I just read this great article by the great JSF (brooklyn wunderkind, after whose character Oskar I modeled my halloween costume).



It's about his relationship with his dog, and animals generally. One of his paragraphs made me think about pigeons. It said this:

...the older we get, the less exposure we have to animals. And nothing facilitates indifference or forgetfulness so much as distance. In this sense, dogs and cats have been very lucky: they are the only animals we are intimately exposed to daily.

This made me think about my concept of pigeons and why I like them so much. It is true, as JSF states, that many of us interact daily with pets. However, as we know, most of our pets are domesticated. They no longer possess most of their wild traits. This brings me to the pigeon. At least for us city-dwellers, the only wild animal with which we interact on a daily basis is the pigeon. We see it scurrying about, eating crumbs, flying too close to our heads...it is living in its natural (at least with respect to the recent past) environment.

Most people who live in or have grown up in the City have nearly NO exposure to animals in their natural environments. The closest they get is the zoo, and that is hardly life as nature intended. The pigeon is a champion of survival, of being flexible and thriving in its surroundings. Similarly, people should be kinder toward pigeons - this attitude of "rodents with wings" really saddens me. Pigeons are one of our last connections to the wild, to nature, to real animals. And they are the targets of so much hatred. About a month ago, walking home from work, I saw a pigeon whose head had been cut off. It was just laying there on top of a newspaper dispenser with no head. I started crying because this is what people are doing to wild creatures; to animals; to nature itself. Sigh. Anyway, the point is, we should all respect the pigeon, and be glad that there are still some things in this world that haven't been caged, domesticated, or genetically altered.

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