Pigeons in the city: Love birds, hate birds

My roommate once killed a pigeon. She flew into the spokes of her bike. It wasn't intentional and she still has a guilty conscience to this day. Amazing, because she actually doesn't like pigeons and finds them disgusting.

In Hamburg, where we live, there are around 25,000 pigeons. My roommate isn't the only person for whom they trigger very strong feelings. A taz colleague is annoyed about pigeons nesting on his balcony and happily talks about baked pigeons filled with wheat groats from his last holiday in Egypt: “Yum!”

Other people have strong compassion for the birds. They share pictures of ripped, emaciated and one-legged pigeons on Telegram. They volunteer to care for sick pigeons, demonstrate for pigeon lofts and write obituaries when a pigeon dies: "I'm so sorry that I couldn't help you anymore, little soul. Your life had just begun, and yet you had to bear so much suffering."

Is it wrong to keep a cat in the big city, why do even friends get into arguments about how to keep city pigeons and is anyone who hates slugs a bad person? This small series explores these and other questions about the relationship between people and city dwellers in loose sequence.

My roommates make fun of these people. Do they also take to the streets for homeless people? My roommates hate pigeons.

Pigeons don't bother me that much. I find the sadness over the death of a pigeon on Instagram strange, but I also don't understand the great disgust for the so-called "rats of the air". I argue that all strong feelings towards birds, both hatred and great compassion, have the same root: fear of becoming pigeons yourself.

City pigeons became unemployed and homeless after 1945 because people no longer had any use for them. They used to live in dovecotes, were postmen, and delivered meat and fertilizer. Since modern technology made them superfluous, they have had to see where they stay in the big city.

Here they find food (chips, crumbs, old kebabs) that they cannot tolerate. The shit you see in the city is actually diarrhea. Because they were bred this way, they are forced to breed constantly and nest in the same places over and over again. A friend from England likes to watch pigeons in his yard and calls them “abandoned proletarians of the bird world.”

We people in late capitalism have eaten the neoliberal ideology of self-responsibility and can never be sure whether we will still be taken care of if we are no longer useful tomorrow. The welfare state is being dismantled and we are afraid.

Perhaps we externalize this legitimate but unpleasant feeling onto the pigeons. Pigeons are particularly suitable as a projection surface for leftists like my roommates, who don't like to badmouth people. They ward off the fear of becoming pigeons themselves by devaluing the animals as balcony shitters who are completely unlike themselves.

The extreme empathy of pigeon lovers is a little more complicated to explain. One might think that in their compassion for pigeons they recognize the possibility of their own decline. Under pictures of tattered pigeons you write “They feel pain like you and me”.

I find the over-identification shady. I think what she actually says is relief at not being a deaf – and hatred of people. Do you remember the poster at the rally for Chico, who was euthanized in 2018 because he had bitten two people to death: “To the world you were just a dog, to us you were the world?” In the end, extreme animal empaths would rather be in relationships with animals they can pity and save than with people or “the world”.

I dream of a world in which people who love pigeons and those who hate pigeons recognize each other in their fear, tear down the walls between them and finally step up to parade through the streets with flocks of unemployed city pigeons hanging over their heads, and demand a world in which everyone can eat vegan broilers filled with wheat groats or species-appropriate grains in district canteens at any time.