Pigeons are also known as rock pigeons or rock doves, and before there were cities, they nested on cliffs. If this couple thought this was a cliff, then who was I to tell them differently? I decided I’d cede the deck to the family and do my best to minimize disturbance—choosing for the time being the inside of the apartment to read the paper and do my work. We humans hadn’t been too good to pigeons—whether poisoning them in cities, or shooting them for targets, as in Pennsylvania—and I was going to try for a small makeup action for our species and give this little family the space they wanted.
Mom and dad were with the chicks almost all of the time for the first few weeks, taking turns to venture out periodically to collect food for the family. They’d come back and regurgitate the bounty—drawing a milky substance from their crops and delivering it right into the mouths of the hungry chicks. They grew fast, and within about five weeks, they had shed their scraggly, cottony covering and in its place came dark, smooth, iridescent feathers. They now looked like “regular” pigeons, only smaller. They stayed put on the soil of the pot for a couple of weeks. But one day, I came home and saw them up and about.
Each night I was in town, I’d come through my door and go straight to see them. They’d be walking around, with their stick-figure legs and bobbing heads. Occasionally, they’d stop and peck at some bug or speck on the deck and then resume their new exercise regimen. I was anxious to see their physical development, their fast progression from helpless hatchlings to self-sufficient juveniles.
Then one night, I came home, and they were gone. I wondered how these neophytes could muster the bravery and take to wing. But I knew that day would come, and here it was. They’d now start a much more challenging and exciting phase of their lives—and I could use my deck again. All birds must leave the nest and learn to fend for themselves. We regard this maturation process as routine, but in truth it is a miracle, especially on the time frame it happens for so many species. Life is so fragile, but so resourceful, too, whether it’s a case of grasses or weeds reaching out of the cracks of a sidewalk, a squirrel building a life around just a tree or two on a city block, or a pigeon finding a plant to nest in on the deck of an apartment.
The mother and her two babies messed up my deck a bit, but that was no matter to me. They’re welcome back anytime. Recent studies on the concept of “cognitive mapping” tell us that pigeons and other animals have an incredible memory for sites and other physical settings. So I wonder if my place will hold significance for them. I wonder if any of them will come back and stop in. I know that when I go back home to New Haven, where I was born and grew up, I sometimes drive by my childhood home to see what it now looks like. We think of animals as too practical for such reminiscing, but I am not so sure.
Pigeons are just one of many species we seek to help through our urban wildlife program. We provide information on the breeding habits and behavior of so many adaptable creatures. We also offer tips and guidance to people on how to deal with raccoons in the chimney, skunks under the deck, woodchucks in the backyard, birds in air vents, or advice on dealing with other wild creatures who’ve decided that some part of our home or landscape makes a good nesting site, resting spot, or playground. In dealing with these cases, it generally comes down to a matter of problem solving and tolerance, since, mostly, the worst the animals do is cause a minor inconvenience. If a conflict erupts, here, too, human ingenuity should be put to work. These conflicts can typically be solved by nonlethal means, such as by capping your chimney to exclude wild animals, so that smoke can come up but a raccoon cannot come down.
In fact, we have a staff of professionals, working mainly in the Washington, D.C., area, who run a program called Humane Wildlife Services, and they do nothing but respond to calls from people concerned about wildlife in or around their home. They’re developing a new business model for wildlife conflicts, providing a happy contrast to the ways of commercial “nuisance wildlife control” trappers. These commercial operators, who often came out of the world of trapping animals for fur and who rarely have the animals’ interest at heart, don’t always inform homeowners about the lethal methods they use. By calling in these trappers, found online or in the phone book, residents often wrongly assume that their problem will be solved and the animal will be released. If they don’t want any harm to come to the creatures causing a bit of trouble, they’ve got to ask the right questions, and also find the right company, assuming outside intervention is needed at all.
Most of the “problems” that urban wildlife cause can be solved, with some good common sense or a few technical fixes. But so much of it comes down to perception and tolerance. For one person, a deer in the backyard is a joyous sight—a treat for everyone in the household. For others, that very same behavior and circumstance on their property is akin to an unwelcome invasion, with the residents fretting about the landscape or ornamental shrubbery or even alarmed about the threat of disease. Some people consider a deer nibbling on azaleas to be a capital offense, though the creature only is doing what comes instinctively to him or her. If it’s the beauty of nature they fear losing in those azaleas, they should stop and take a longer look at the deer, and they’ll see something more beautiful than anything that grows in a garden.
Some people seek to wall themselves off from wild animals. That’s an odd view, given our settlement patterns these days. About half of Americans live in the suburbs, and that typically means that these homeowners have more land than city dwellers. Their homes are often framed by careful landscaping, manicured lawns, and young or old trees. The whole setting is designed to blend comfortable living within a natural setting, even if it’s manufactured. The growth of big-box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s cater to industrious people who take pride in their homes and invest in every inch of their property.
For so many people, it’s an emotionally satisfying place, constructed on the ideals of green and open space. But trees and plants and open space attract other living things, and these creatures graze on grass or plants, nest in trees, take refuge in window wells, or just pass through. You cannot have one without the other. Many people invite these animals in, with bird feeders or other setups built for wildlife, welcoming these creatures. But there are others who want to turn them away and don’t much care what happens to them. I am always perplexed by this selective attitude that appreciates natural surroundings, but not the animals who live there. After all, the entire landscape, especially if it’s a new development, was probably the recent home of some bear or woodchuck, so the original tenants have claims of their own, too.
“We are about at the point with urban wildlife where Henry Bergh was in the 1860s with domesticated animals,” Dr. Hadidian tells me, explaining that people are still adjusting to the idea of wildlife within their midst. He reminds me that we have little in the way of an infrastructure to help people sort through the conflicts. That’s why some take matters into their own hands or call out a nuisance trapper, who is often just an exterminator by another name. “People want the right answers, but they don’t know where to get them.” Hadidian says the nation has a pretty remarkable network of wildlife rehabilitation centers, but they are dealing with just some of the victims of human impacts on urban wildlife. We need institutions to help prevent problems, or to solve them once they occur, much as the local Humane Society or SPCA helps with cats and dogs. “We have to recognize the need for humane treatment of these animals, too, and for understanding that they deserve their own place.”
All of our communities are environments shared with other animals, and it’s our duty more than ever to be tolerant and even generous, especially given all of our intrusions into their traditional habitats. A red-tailed hawk named Pale Male nested on a building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in the 1990s, just across from Central Park, which itself was one of the first urban parks and a template for other such parks in other major cities. Pale Male and his mate attracted an enormous following, successfully breeding in the city for years before a c
o-op board abruptly decided to destroy the nest. The whole episode was a reminder that the divide between urban living and wild areas is itself artificial. “Wildlife” and “wilderness” are no longer “far away”—a romantic ideal removed from daily human existence. Like the pigeons who came down from above to roost on my deck, or the hawks who made a home in New York, they are adaptable and resourceful animals, and they are here with us now. That’s a wonderful thing, and something to appreciate, even if it requires some forbearance and maybe even a little effort.
The presence of wild, free-roaming creatures results in some conflicts, but also opportunities—both moral and economic. New businesses can emerge to solve conflicts, to sell goods to appeal to our instinct to feed or attract wildlife, and to nurse animals when they are injured or ill or orphaned. Community leaders can plan for green causeways and open space, to give residents the beauty and comfort that come with sharing our surroundings with fellow creatures. Some planned communities, such as Harmony in central Florida, have been designed with the idea of attracting wildlife and having animals live among them.
The new economy, and the new communities within it, show that we can be far more attentive to the land and life around us, reflecting that concern in the way we build our homes, design our transportation systems, zone our communities, and preserve open space. We can be developers without being destroyers, and kindly neighbors to the creatures in our midst.
Chemistry and Compassion
WHEREVER HUMANS LIVE, WE affect the lives of so many animals and the fortunes of so many species. There is trouble on many fronts, but also a growing consensus on the side of the animals, to spare them from extinction while there is still time. The particular solutions are still being debated, and proportional responses are still resisted in some circles. But the good news is that the basic moral framework is established. As the naturalist Aldo Leopold noted more than a half century ago, the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save the parts.
At the same time, there are still those who insist that there are simply too many animals—be they wild, feral, or domesticated. They regard wild animals as a nuisance or worse, and faced with any conflict or even any inconvenience their first response is always the harshest—whether it’s culling seals or wolves in the most remote wilderness areas, shooting deer or bears in the suburbs, or even culling dogs or cats seen as pests in cities across the world. Such people view every animal-related problem as a call for raw force, and they themselves sometimes need to be corrected by force of law. In other cases, human intervention is indeed required, but it needn’t be violent and indiscriminate. There are plenty of nonlethal means of avoiding or solving conflicts with wildlife, and plenty of people know how to apply them.
Not everybody is neighborly about pigeons, for example. Many people wouldn’t think of ceding their deck to the birds for even a few weeks. And truth be told, those kindly people who dispense bread and seeds from their park benches, and are then encircled by a mob of birds, seem to be in the minority in many communities. If not contempt, familiarity with pigeons seems to breed at least an active dislike on the part of many citizens. There are people who protest to city hall about these “rats with wings,” irritated by the droppings and sometimes even the mere sight of the birds. Typically, city officials oblige these people too readily, dispatching nighttime details to trap and kill the birds, or simply laying out poison-laced foods that produce the worst of deaths.
Pigeon culling is a not-so-closely-held secret in many cities—one of the lesser-known “municipal services,” like the killing of strays in the dog pound. It’s a matter best left unspoken, at least as the folks doing the trapping and poisoning see it. But a new attitude is taking hold in urban wildlife management, and even the most hardened opponents of pigeons and other “nuisance wildlife” can hardly quarrel with the fix: chemical birth control for the birds. Today, more cities, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, St. Paul, and Tucson, are opting in, and their product of choice is OvoControl, a kibble bait that, after it is ingested, reduces egg hatching rates.
Technology and innovation are making it easier than ever for us to handle abundant populations of animals in nonlethal ways. Innolytics, the maker of OvoControl, is also promoting similar products for use on other birds, including Muscovy ducks in Florida, feral chickens in Hawaii, and resident Canada geese in the Mid-Atlantic states.
Nonchemical strategies are also a part of the solution. In Michigan, HSUS has for years worked with the state’s Department of Natural Resources on an annual egg hunt, finding eggs laid by resident geese and oiling them to arrest their development. The oiled eggs don’t hatch, but because they’re left in the nest, mom doesn’t produce a new clutch—keeping the population in check. It may seem unfair to the mothers to prevent the eggs from hatching, but the alternative is far worse—roundups and gassing of entire flocks, including the mothers.
Wildlife scientists working in concert with the HSUS have also developed contraceptives for mammals—using the vaccine to control elephant populations in South Africa, as an alternative to culling, and to limit the growth of deer populations in the United States, as on Fire Island in New York and Fripp Island in South Carolina. Researchers Jay Kirkpatrick and John Turner first proved the efficacy of a vaccine known as PZP in 1989 on Assateague Island National Seashore to manage the herd of wild horses on the ecologically sensitive barrier island.
When it comes to wild horses and burros, however, the most important use for contraceptive technology is for herds that roam public lands in the West. In 1971, Congress passed the Wild Horse and Free-Roaming Burro Act, declaring these animals “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” that “contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people.” Even though Congress noted that the animals were “fast disappearing from the American scene,” the federal Bureau of Land Management has from the outset implemented the law through roughshod removal of horses from the range as a population control tool. The National Park Service was even less forgiving toward the wild burros of the Grand Canyon—who were rescued by Cleveland Amory from a planned massacre and became the first inhabitants of the Black Beauty Ranch.
The BLM says it puts the captured horses up for adoption, but the agency has swamped the system by gathering too many animals—usually at the prodding of ranchers who graze their cattle on public lands at below-market rates and mistake that privilege for the right to evict wild horses and burros. The result has been a swelling captive horse population, which BLM maintains and feeds through contractors. Within the last two decades, the captive population of wild horses and burros has climbed past thirty thousand, and the government is spending more than $25 million a year—75 percent of total funding for the program—just to care for the captive animals.
This is a ridiculous and shameful outcome, far from the intent of Congress, and the BLM needs to scale back its roundups and removals, putting contraception to work broadly as an on-the-range management program. With support from the Annenberg Foundation, HSUS has been working with BLM to this end. This approach is the only way out of a decades-long problem that BLM has handled so amateurishly.
Chemical contraception for animals will someday extend even to dogs and cats. In the spring of 2010, I was one of a few nonscientists to attend the latest conference of the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs (ACCD), the primary organization devoted to finding nonsurgical methods of sterilization for companion animals. If we are to reach the goal of ending euthanasia of healthy animals in America by 2020, and the particularly cruel killing methods used to control the population of dogs and cats throughout the world, we can’t just keep doing things the way we have for decades. One sign that the tide is turning was the recent news that billionaire philanthropist and animal advocate Gary Michelson has pledged $75 million, through his Found Animals Foundation, in prizes and grants “for promising research in the pursuit of a safe, effective, and practical non-surgical
sterilant for use in cats and dogs.”
The standard method for controlling reproduction of dogs and cats, surgical sterilization, and the message “to spay and neuter your dogs and cats” have been hallmarks of the humane movement’s approach to overpopulation for decades. Along with promoting adoption, these approaches have lowered annual euthanasia totals in the United States from perhaps twenty million in the mid-1970s to four million today. But surgical sterilization costs money, and the procedure can only be done by a licensed veterinarian. It’s common and effective, but surveys of pet owners show that cost and access to this service are impediments. If the scientists working with ACCD succeed, it will give the cause a remarkable new tool—allowing public and private agencies to limit reproduction, and thereby to prevent the needless and often cruel killing of millions of dogs and cats. As I write, Iraq is now engaging in a mass killing of tens of thousands of street animals, and China has being doing the same in recent years. A contraceptive vaccine, administered through feed or other means, will spell the end of these barbaric methods, sparing dogs and cats from being poisoned, or being bludgeoned and shot on streets and sidewalks.
This new approach of contraception is just one feature of the humane economy, in which human inventiveness is deployed in the service of compassionate solutions. And as today’s innovations become tomorrow’s standard practice, there is just no rational argument for animal “cleansing” programs of any kind. Those who insist on lethal depopulation plans do so out of stubborn denial or worse—an actual loathing of animals and indifference to suffering. And when it comes to domestic animal populations like dogs or cats, whether it’s here or abroad, we’ll soon be able to deploy superior methods of population control. The day will come when people who prefer poisoning and killings will at least know enough to keep their thoughts to themselves.
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