Why do I hate pigeons?

What people hold against them

The charges against the pigeon are social ones.

• They are everywhere, and there are too many of them.
• They are dirty, and so is everything under where they sit.
• They hang about for crumbs and will not be shooed.
• They are common. A robin is a pleasure. A pigeon is a pigeon.

What pigeons are actually like

The city pigeon has a history most people who dislike it have never heard.

• They are our own birds. People tamed the rock pigeon, raised it for food, trained it to race and carry messages and took it all over the world. The birds in city squares now live wild or half wild, and they are there because we brought them.Source: Audubon Field Guide, Rock Pigeon
• They can find their way home from a long way off, even when taken there blindfolded. They are able to sense the earth’s magnetic field and use the position of the sun.Source: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds
• They learn fast. In a 2015 study, pigeons were trained to tell benign breast tissue from cancerous tissue on medical slides. They went from guessing to 85 percent correct in 15 days.Source: Levenson and colleagues, PLOS ONE, 2015

What the contempt can point to

Contempt is a judgement about worth, so it is worth asking what you count as worthless and why. These are guesses for you to check, not conclusions.

The plainest charge against the pigeon is that it is ordinary. There are thousands of them and none stands out. If that is what irritates you, it may touch a fear of your own: being one of a crowd, unremarkable, easy to replace. People who have worked hard to be exceptional are often the hardest on whatever is plain and gets by anyway.

The second charge is that it begs. It waits near people for what they drop. Some of us were taught that asking is shameful and that you take nothing you have not earned. An animal that asks all day, without embarrassment, can be hard to watch.

And there is the history. We valued these birds while they fed us and carried our messages, and then we stopped. If you have ever been dropped once you were no longer needed, or have done it to someone else, the pigeon is standing right on that spot.

Three questions to ask yourself

1. What do you feel when you see something ordinary doing perfectly well?
2. Where in your life do you feel like one of a crowd, and how much does that bother you?
3. Is there someone you valued while they were useful to you and then stopped noticing?