Another measure of the degree to which humankind is striving to develop protocols that are ethical is our relationship with a readily observable group of birds who appear to have pardoned H. sapiens for our past misdeeds, namely, the family known as Columbidae, with its approximate 310 species of pigeons and doves.
While their history has been celebrated, humans eat them, destroy them by any number of means, and have fashioned entire industries to “control” them. Yet, it is estimated that there are probably no more than 400 million pigeons left in the world today. That is a shockingly low number, considering that in mid-nineteenth-century America, there were billions of just one of those many hundreds of species, the Passenger Pigeon (*Ectopistes migratorius*), and we assiduously made sure she went extinct by 1914โjust in time for us to kill 17 million and injure and maim another 20 million of ourselves in World War I.
Pigeons, like hens, chickens, and roosters, display astonishing diversities, behavior, social bonds, language, and song, as well as beauty in most human eyesโcertainly all those who delight at St. Mark’s Square in Venice and, before the laws turned squeamishly anti-pigeon, Trafalgar Square in London. That same zoophobia can be seen in laws against feeding birds from Paris to Pasadena. Ironically, it is in England’s National Gallery, abutting Trafalgar, that the British Empire keeps one of its most touching and important works of artโalong with a vast litany of paintings depicting horses, cows, sheep, and any number of other animals, both dead and aliveโbut, in this stated instance, we are referring to Titian’s Boy With A Bird, circa 1520s.
Pigeons have been awarded medals of heroism in war. One pigeon, Cher Ami, saved the 77th Division in the Battle of the Argonne in the autumn of 1918. One would hope such commendations might gain traction in a “general election” favoring pigeons; that a pigeon test might be employed to determine the humanism of any town, with its plaza; of any city and her denizens; of any country and the citizenry who either love, or, at worst, pay no attention to pigeons.
There is nothing particularly new in granting celebratory status to monkey and rat temples in Nepal and India; Australia’s Norfolk Island over to cows; a cat island (Tashiromima); rabbit island (ลkunoshima); and dragonfly parks in Japan; or protected dogs and cows across Bhutan’s roadsides; revered Marsh Rabbits in the Florida Keys; Pig Island in the Big Major Cay (Bahamas); Ilha de Queimada Grande, the Snake Island off the coast of Brazil (teeming with Golden Lancehead Vipers); the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge, the Farallon Islands, 28 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge; Wrangel Island in Russia, between the Arctic Ocean’s Chuckchi and East Siberian Seas; the rhesus monkeys on Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico; the wild horse island (Assateague, in Maryland); live butterfly pavilions in London and Los Angeles; and gardens everywhere, including Beatrix Potter’s house and the outer green corridors of Kyoto being the historical global epicenters of this ancient humanโnature affiliation.
UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network, launched in 2004, comprises 116 city members from dozens of countries, the idea being to cultivate creative and sustainable urban environments. The European Wilderness Society has formed its own Pan-European Green Corridor Network. There are humane networks around the globe and greening trends everywhereโfrom cities with the most animal-friendly hotels, vegetarian-only condo complexes in Mumbai, to animal-friendly airlines. All of this should make a pigeon test a pretty elementary requirement for any Metropolitan Statistical Area (any urban conurbation with a minimum of 50,000 human residents).
When a village or city celebrates an animal or identifies with a species, people take note. Explorer Ruth Harkness brought the first Giant Panda to the USA in 1936, and a contagion of celebrities and the public far and wide came to visit the bottle-fed Su Lin at the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago. A cephalopod, Inky the Octopus, plotted and successfully executed his own “Great Escape” (the movie was in 1963), playing the roles of Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough, along with Director John Sturges all in one, the night he slipped through a labyrinth of constraints at the National Aquarium in Napier, New Zealand, successfully disappearing back into his home, the Pacific Ocean, having gotten through drain pipes and racing across many floors.
Another octopus named Paul picked all the winning teams in advance of Germany’s 2010 World Cup in South Africa, making quite a name for himself; while many other Octopoda have lent glory to their urban captors by simply escaping human confinement. These are all very sick kinds of enthusiasm, which should, in a logical world, put a mirror to just what is actually going on.
How can we be confident of the Mozart frog analogy?
Why must we be sure?
“Certainty” would prove nothing; facts can be feckless in their influence; nor would some ecological Day the Earth Stood Still or The Voice of the Dolphins necessarily change the politics of our relations with other species. This is Animal Farm writ on a planetary level, where the ramifications of our acquired wisdom and religion have never consistently granted relations between peopleโlet alone those causes and effects engulfing people in their orientations to personages of other speciesโany peace of mind.
No matter what steps will probably be put in place or not by our forever-intrusive research into the minds of our fellow creatures on this planet, there’s a rapidly approaching truth: we are most certainly newcomers to a biosphere buzzing with intelligence, wit, playfulness, imaginative solutions to problems, and creative juices, so to speak.
This is the realityโa remarkable discovery in our backyards that changes everythingโor it should; a backyard, in the most sublime sense, that will be considered later on in this work.
