This city plans to sic falcons on pigeons. Activists race to defend ‘pigeon’s rights’
To many city dwellers, pigeons are an annoyance and a pest, animals to be looked at with disgust and cast off as “rats with wings.”
That’s largely been the story in Paris, where the city has been trying to deal with a rampant pigeon population for years. The birds congregate in huge numbers on ledges and windows, and their droppings are estimated to cause more than $170,000 in damages every year, according to the city.
They’ve tried spikes that keep the birds from perching and specialized lofts. None of those have worked, a town spokesman told UPI.
Their newest solution? Deadly birds of prey.
The mayor of the 10th arrondissement (a type of administrative district) announced that two hawks and three falcons will be brought into the area to attack and ultimately scare the pigeons away from the area.
“We tried traditional methods and now we are doing something more radical,” a spokesman for the town hall of the 10th arrondissement told The Local. “Paris pigeons are not used to birds of prey.”
Officials said the cost of the operation would be the equivalent of around $15,000 U.S. dollars.
The idea isn’t for the birds to swoop in and eat the pigeons, which they may anyway, but instead for them to fly around menacingly and scare the pigeons away.
But some locals reacted with outrage and demanded a reversal of the plan, saying it trampled on pigeon’s rights, wasted taxpayer money and could harm other birds like sparrows.
“We are very strongly opposed to the measure,” Brigitte Marquet, president of the Pigeon Embassy, told Le Parisien. “It won’t solve the problem of regulating the number of pigeons in the city, but it will also be very expensive for taxpayers, and extremely cruel for the targeted birds.”
Marquet said the plan would only serve to unnecessarily stress the birds, which would quickly return when the predators were removed.
“Scared off for a while, the pigeons will very quickly return after taking refuge in a neighbouring arrondissement, except, naturally, the few who are killed,” a petition from Ambassade des pigeons said.
Instead, they encouraged the use of more contraceptive lofts, wherein the birds lay eggs which are swapped out with fakes.
The petition urging a cancellation of the plan has already been signed more than 20,000 times.
It’s not the first time citizens have banded together to stick up for one of the city’s less savory animal denizens. Tens of thousands of Parisians signed a petition earlier this year in protest of a plan to exterminate a huge population of rats in the city, which they called “genocide.”
This story was originally published October 3, 2017 at 12:28 PM with the headline "This city plans to sic falcons on pigeons. Activists race to defend ‘pigeon’s rights’."