{"id":779174,"date":"2025-09-05T08:36:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T12:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=779174"},"modified":"2025-09-05T10:32:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T14:32:08","slug":"779174","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=779174","title":{"rendered":"Pigeon Life: From a bird’s eye view"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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Sharing space with pigeons isn\u2019t just a matter of us and animals. If you share a gaze with a pigeon, you start breaking down the hard limits of what\u2019s supposed to be human. Pigeons are teachers for anyone who wants to understand how we humans relate with nature. They are agreeable and soothing companions for many people. The interrelations between humans and pigeons hold out new understandings of being in the world, and the relationships between ourselves and others.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

JULIE WARK:<\/strong> When not being called dirty, pigeons are denigrated as dumb, like the humans that are called bird-brained. Like most slurs, this one says more about users than targets. Pigeons aren\u2019t simply objects to be acted on, for example to be turned into the famous highly effective wartime messengers for humans. They have their own agency and are highly intelligent in ways humans sometimes aren\u2019t. For starters, they are 99% accurate when distinguishing between healthy and cancerous tissue in X-rays and microscope slides; they can discriminate between paintings by Monet and Picasso; they can recognise letters of the alphabet and sometimes dozens of words, and can even spot spelling mistakes; they know human faces; and they can learn abstract rules about numbers.<\/em><\/p>\n

Like their beauty, which you only see if you learn how to look at them, their contributions to their surroundings are usually ignored. They eat large amounts of refuse; contribute to plant pollination; are being studied for the health benefits of their highly nutritious crop \u201cmilk\u201d (a sloughing of epithelial cells from the crop lining) produced by both males and females to feed their squabs; are agreeable, soothing companions for many people, from young children to society\u2019s human refuse. For example, for the brilliant scientist Nikola Tesla, the love of his life was a pigeon: \u201cAs long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life\u201d… pigeons are teachers for anyone who wants to understand how we humans relate with nature, which includes how we relate with each other.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sharing space with pigeons isn\u2019t just a matter of us and animals. Jacques Derrida suggests that humans use the word \u201canimal\u201d to separate ourselves from what we consider inhuman, thus creating a harsh rupture between us and them. In his 1980 essay \u201cWhy Look at Animals\u201d, John Berger writes, \u201canimals are always the observed\u201d, objects of observation, denied any ability to observe and interact with humans, basically because they\u2019re there to be exploited. As early as 1524, the revolutionary German theologian Thomas M\u00fcntzer was on to this in his Sermon to the Princes: \u201cBehold, the basic source of usury, theft, and robbery is our lords and princes, who take all creatures for their private property. The fish in the water, the birds in the air, the animals of the earth must all be their property.\u201d But if you share a gaze with a pigeon, you start breaking down the hard limits of what\u2019s supposed to be human.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Nature, Culture and Gender, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern argues that the nature\/culture binary is a \u201cuseless\u201d analytical concept and it also has real-life ramifications in relations among humans. Western culture, regulated by, dominated by human thought and technology\u2014and the men that control it\u2014is valued as superior to unregulated nature. So women, who are seen as inferior and needing to be controlled, are linked with nature, and men with \u201cculture\u201d. Strathern shows that non-western peoples don\u2019t understand the world like this. It\u2019s yet another western concept of domination, as crude as phrenology as a measure of mental activity.<\/em><\/p>\n

The nature\/culture divide may be a useless analytical tool but it\u2019s a powerful mechanism of exploitation which… underlies the present horrors of ecocide and genocide. Like evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, Strathern understands the world in terms of connections or symbiosis. Breaking the real connections between humans and other animals is an absurd (but no less cruel for that) excuse for exploiting animals (which, in the end, includes other humans that are given undesirable animal qualities)… <\/em><\/p>\n

The interrelations between humans and pigeons hold out new understandings of being in the world, and the relationships between ourselves and others, in an epoch when humans are busy killing a huge part of life on earth. And each other. <\/em>Breaking the human\/animal (nature\/culture) divide, becoming the animal we actually are (and seem so afraid of being) doesn\u2019t require any physical transformation or imitation. It\u2019s about challenging divisive dichotomies and moving away from imposed conceptions and identities of \u201chuman\u201d. <\/em>SOURCE…<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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