Just a quick link: Gene Baur of Farm Sanctuary has published a great blog post about the impact our eating decisions have upon the environment, including our overconsumption of oil.
http://farmsanctuary.typepad.com/making_hay/2010/06/the-power-on-your-plate.html
I wrote about the oil spill about a month ago, when it had just happened. Of course, the oil is still flowing today. Sigh.
Once again I must post about the frequently overlooked pigeon, described in this DailyMail article as “among the most intelligent of all the bird species.”
After waiting for the fountain to be free, one bird jumped on the lever and pushed it down to fill up the bowl, while another kept watch and the third splashed in.
When it had drunk its fill and cleaned its feathers, the third pigeon hopped up to the handle and let his friends have a go.
Pigeons have been proven again and again to be quite smart–something that shouldn’t surprise us considering their remarkable ability to adapt to cities after thousands of years living on the remote cliffs of Europe and Asia. I’ll admit that in all that I’ve read about pigeon intelligence, though, I’ve never seen anything quite like this!
Are you a bird-lover like me? Learn more about these gentle doves here.
Here is a batch of links from the past week or so, for your reading pleasure. Sorry to get to it so late. The biggest story was probably the HSUS veal slaughterhouse investigation, but I’ve only included one link to a story about it below. I’ll try to do a recap post about that story sometime this week.
NPR: For Foer, Meat is Murder …And Worse
New Yorker review of Eating Animals
Wolves, moose and biodiversity: An unexpected connection
Hearts on Noses pig sanctuary fundraiser at Karmavore
HSUS veal slaughterhouse investigation
Poultry giant Tyson sued by the state of Oklahoma
Meat loving cowboy is still vegan
Supervegan: Does it matter that Jonathan Safran Foer isn’t vegan?
Digging through the dirt: ‘Bones’ Features Factory Farm, Slaughterhouse Footage
VegNews interview with Jonathan Safran Foer
Change.org Animal Rights blog: There Is No Such Animal as “Seafood”
Animal Place: Divine Turkey Talk
The Vegan Dietician: No Need for Vegans to Give Up Fat, Gluten, Soy or Cooked Foods
Today is International Vulture Awareness Day, and because I am a huge bird lover, I was excited for the opportunity to participate. Vultures are finally getting the respect they deserve after years of being viewed as a creepy symbol of death and decay. Of course, their unsavoury scavenging habits are actually an important part of a healthy ecology; without them, corpses are left to rot and infections are more easily spread.
There are about 20 different species of vultures, and the majority of them qualify as rare, threatened, endangered, and even extinct. In honour of IVAD, I’m going to discuss one of the most famous endangered vulture species.
In North America, of course, that species is the California Condor, a magnificent bird who is extinct in the wild with the exception of 172 captive-bred, released birds. (There are another 150 living in captivity. ) This is a remarkable number considering the fact that in the mid-1980’s, there were 3 left in the wild and 22 in captivity. Environmental groups have been working hard to monitor the success of these 322 individuals.
What happened to cause these amazing birds–who happen to have one of the largest wingspans in the world, and the largest in N. America, at close to 10 feet–to become so severely endangered? The largest factors have been poaching, DDT poisoning, habitat destruction (largely due to animal agriculture), and lead poisoning. The last occurred as a result of eating the corpses of animals killed with lead bullets. It took until 2008–yes, last year–to require hunters to use non-lead bullets in the condors’ range, but my understanding is that the majority of them have been fairly cooperative.
I would be lax in discussing the California condor without also mentioning that not all environmentalists were in favour of capturing the last 3 wild birds–for this is what was done–and attempting to revive the species in captivity. I am against zoos and keeping animals in captivity in general, and I am unsure about this situation. I feel that perhaps it would be reasonable and logical if we were eliminating the major threats that face California condors, but we haven’t. The released birds continue to be threatened by the aforementioned habitat destruction, power lines, (captive-bred condors have been trained fairly successfully to avoid human beings and power lines, but for how long can this be done?) , and hunting. Yes, people continue to kill these birds in the most direct way possible.
Obviously this is a massive, massive topic and I have blabbed about it long enough, but if you want to learn more about California condors I would suggest checking out the Wikipedia page, which is particularly informative, and Vulture-Territory.com, which brings up the interesting idea that perhaps the condors hit their evolutionary peak hundreds of thousands of years ago and were on their way out anyway.
If you are interested in helping the condors out, though–or any endangered animal, for that matter–check out this page from the Toronto Vegetarian Association and learn about the undeniable link between animal agriculture and the destruction of wild habitats. (Hey, even the U.N. says that it’s “one of the major causes of the world’s most pressing environmental problems.”)
Thanks for reading and happy IVAD!
I just watched this report from a year ago about building over- and underpasses for wildlife so that they can get from one side of the highway to the other.
A wildlife overpass
When we build highways or towns it very often divides an animal’s natural habitat. These people are trying to come up with solutions that protect the animals and allow for us to live and travel.
How else could we lighten our footprint or enable animals to live within and around our habitat? Is our habitat as important for our survival as particular habitat is for bears, elk, caribou, etc.?
One of my favorite people, David Eby – who is a tireless advocate for the homeless, the poor, and people on the fringes of society – posted this entry on his blog yesterday about the remodeling of Pigeon Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).
In case you don’t know about it, the DTES is one of the poorest postal codes in Canada, with a disproportionate number of marginalized people living on the streets and in run-down single occupancy rooms. Pigeon Park is really just a wedge of widened sidewalk on one corner, with some benches and a couple of trees.
Here’s how David describes it:
There’s this park, a crappy little triangle of a park, located at the corner of Carrall and Hastings Streets in the DTES. Nothing much to speak of. Some interlocking brick, some concrete planters, a large wall of plywood beside an empty building, and several benches.
Such is Pigeon Park.
It is probably, per square foot, the most heavily used park in Vancouver. There’s always lots of people hanging out. Some are drunk. Some are high. Some are not. All are sitting, or standing, or talking, or whatever the hell they want. It’s a park for the people of the Downtown Eastside.
Most other people wouldn’t bother making the connection to the Park’s namesake, but David does:
Everyone knows it’s Pigeon Park, and for a park name, it’s probably the most fitting park name in the world. Pigeons are birds that have managed, despite all odds, to survive in the urban environment. Pigeons are survivors.
Pigeons are also hated. Called nuisances. Fenced out, chased out, kicked when they’re down. Probably a story that, good and bad, sounds all too familiar to many of the folks that use that park.
I love how he brings the story of pigeons in to the story of the park and the people who use the park. Intersectionality in action, eloquently put. His whole post is good, please check it out.
Thanks David, for all the great work!
[Sorry for the lack of posts over the past 2 weeks. Between work and rebuilding our kitchen, I haven't had a lot of time to write. Sorry also for the shortness of this post. I saw David's post yesterday but only got to it today. And I have approximately 7 million other things to do this morning.]
Emperor Penguins
Scientists have stated that the magnificent Emperor Penguin may be extinct within the century due to loss of ice caused by climate change. As the earth warms, we are going to start seeing more and more animals becoming extinct.
What can we do to help? One of the easiest and most effective ways that we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions is to switch to a plant-based diet. It is far more effective than even switching from a car to a bicycle or buying all local meat, milk, and eggs.
The UN reported that animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s several percentage points higher than transportation.
The demise of the Emperor Penguin may not be so much caused by your SUV, but rather by the burger on your plate.
A swan on Lost Lagoon
Many people enjoy seeing all the birds at Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park here in Vancouver, the swans in particular.
But I was troubled to learn that the swans are not there because they like the lake, but because they are kept there. They all have their wing tendons clipped so that they can’t fly away. This makes them prisoners in their own homes.
As the ducks and geese come and go, the swans are unable to fly anywhere. Because more swans are kept on the lake than would be possible in the wild, they are fed by the park authorities each morning. In nature, only one pair of swans would live on a lake this size.
It is wonderful to see swans, but now that I know that they are not there by choice, I don’t think I can enjoy seeing them anymore. Now they’ll just make me sad, like any imprisonment of animals (i.e. the nearby aquarium).
Most of my information for this post comes from the Stanley Park Ecological Society website.
Despite the fact that thousands of pigeons share our city with us, very few of us know anything about them.
For example, did you know that pigeons are actually doves? Their official name is actually “Rock Dove” or “Rock Pigeon”, and they are in the same family—Columbidae—as the dove. In English, the name “pigeon” is usually used for larger members of the family and “dove” for smaller members, but many languages only have one word for these birds. But for a long time, “pigeon” and “dove” were used interchangeably.
Pigeons bathing in a puddle
Back to the original question: What do city pigeons have in common with snow leopards and yaks?
Pigeons can fly 70 km/hr (44 mph)--up to 600 miles in one day.
For one thing, they share the same original habitat—wild places like the Himalayas! Before we brought pigeons to our cities, they lived in the world’s wildest places, like the cliffs and mountains of Europe and Asia. How did they come to share our sidewalks with us? Well, like many species, they’re here because we brought them. Some of these domesticated pigeons escaped and have thrived because the ledges, windowsills, and bridges of a city are so similar to the cliffs of their original homes. (source)
Some people think that pigeons are dirty, but fortunately for all of us, this just isn’t true. In fact, a search of disease studies over more than 60 years found so few cases of diseases transmitted from feral pigeons to humans that the researchers concluded, “Although feral pigeons pose sporadic health risks to humans, the risk is very low, even for humans involved in occupations that bring them into close contact with nesting sites.” (D. Haag-Wackernagel and H. Mock, “Health Hazards Posed by Feral Pigeons,” Journal of Infection 48 (2004): 307-13. ) You are actually more likely to get a disease from a pet bird than a city pigeon. (The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, “Facts About Pigeon-Related Diseases,” The City of New York 2005.)
This lovely pigeon is from rescuereport.org
What can you do if you have pigeons on your property and you don’t want them there? In Vancouver, the favoured way of dealing with pigeons is putting up small metal spines on the edges of buildings or signs. A friend of mine told me that she keeps a little squirt bottle to spray water in their direction when they land on her balcony. Both options are humane and effective, but there is an even better method of population control when it comes to pigeons: stop feeding them! Everyone knows that it is a lot of fun to feed the birds, but we must remember that feeding wild animals is not necessarily in their best interest.
This is because a pigeon breeds anywhere from 1 to 6 times a year, depending on how much food she is able to get, and young birds can breed by the age of just 6 months. (This is why poisoning pigeons is not only extremely cruel but totally useless, and may even result in a larger population than before. More here: Pigeon Control Advisory Service, “Why Lethal Bird Control Fails”)
Pigeons are monogamous and mate for life.
One more thing–did you know that pigeons are pretty smart? They have been featured in numerous studies, and scientists have learned a few things:
More pigeon-related info:
Project Pigeon Watch at Cornell University
The Human Nature of Pigeons (PDF from United Poultry Concerns)
What’s so special about pigeons?
When we left our house this morning I saw this pair of Mallard ducks on the lawn right across the street.
She is sleeping with her head tucked under her wing while he keeps watch.
He stayed really calm but checked us out and watched us until we were gone.
I haven’t ever seen ducks in our neighborhood before, so this was a very rare and exciting treat.
Do you ever see ducks or other wild animals around where you live?
