'Pigeons not the only disease vectors'

“I don’t think people look at a sparrow and see a vector. The pigeons’ natural home was the rocky cliff-side, they prefer concrete to trees,” says expert

Professor Colin Jerolmack never paid much attention to pigeons until one defecated on him. In his 2013 book the Global Pigeon he, however, studied the journey of pigeons and feeding bans across London, Venice and New York. Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at the New York University, he has often been called ‘the Pigeon guy’ in American publications. As Mumbai and other Indian cities face an impasse over the feeding of pigeons that has often evoked very strong emotions, in an interview with Mayura Janwalkar, Jerolmack discusses the synanthropes that, he feels, have been judged unfairly by humans.

Jerolmack discusses the synanthropes that, he feels, have been judged unfairly by humans

Q: There is an impasse in Mumbai and many other parts of India about feeding pigeons. On the one hand there is the question of public health and on the other religious beliefs of certain communities. Is the religious aspect present in other countries as well?

CJ: Pigeons have had religious or sacred significance for thousands of years in many different societies. In Turkey there are some mosques where Muslims will stop to feed the pigeons before entering. Pigeons have been associated with love and fertility because they breed so many times a year, and they are monogamous so they often get associated with love. In Venice, the story that was passed down about the pigeons of Piazza San Marco was this: Back when Venice was ruled by the doges, there was a doge who would release pigeons to hungry masses, but of course, many of the pigeons would not get caught by people. Then came the idea that whenever the pigeons were not caught for some period of time, they had to be cared for and fed. That, over time, became a tradition in Venice.

Q: In Mumbai, many people living near pigeon feeding centres have been afflicted with respiratory illnesses. Was that the case in any of the other places you’ve observed?

CJ: People often call pigeons rats with wings. That is an intentional framing that wants to highlight that they are disease vectors in the way we all know that rats can be. Certainly, in Venice and in England there were a lot of public health claims made. Though, I am not aware of any evidence in either of those cases that people were actually getting sick because of pigeons. In the context of the US, when the city of New York criminalised pigeon feeding and put up all these signs in the parks, they mentioned all the different diseases that pigeons can transmit. I actually interviewed a bunch of epidemiologists who were focused on human-animal disease transmission and they all said they don’t really have (sufficient) evidence of people getting sick from tree pigeons. People felt that they were dirty and disorderly and this was a broader clean-up-the-streets kind of move. However, that doesn’t mean that there can’t be public health issues. Though I’ve never been to India but if there are dedicated structures (kabootarkhanas), then faeces accumulates and bacteria can grow in there. In such cases it certainly is possible that one can get sick from tree pigeons. That would be a level of legitimacy around a public health claim that is absent in the other cases.

Q: Wildlife scientists say that the practice of feeding pigeons has altered their natural instincts. What are your observations?

CJ: We are talking about a bird that is probably the first bird to be domesticated, somewhere between 5,000-10,000 years ago. These are not wild animals. My understanding is that from the moment humans made agricultural settlements and started to be stationary, and not hunter, gatherer, pigeons started living near our settlements to forage grain. People started encouraging that because they could then eat them, and use the faeces for fertiliser. So, for thousands of years we’ve semi-domesticated even the wild pigeons. In the traditional sense, nothing that pigeons are doing in cities is natural. Even pigeons that live in cities and are not being fed regularly by people, they are not foraging the way their ancestors did on the cliffs of North Africa. They are just eating trash.

Q: Which city do you think has dealt with the issue of pigeon-feeding most feasibly?

CJ: Back in the 90s, the city of Basel in Switzerland decided that pigeon-feeding, was out of control. They created dovecotes run by the city. A dovecote is any kind of structure that pigeons are not confined to but they can come and spend time there. People who want to feed them can go to these designated feeding areas and can’t feed them anywhere else in the city. The designated feeding areas are in places that are not next to dense settlements. People can feed them in these places, and this is monitored by a municipal worker. Resultantly, the number of birds went down, and pigeon health went up because they were actually getting grain or corn. That’s the one that stands out.

Q: Your book points out the contradiction in ‘greening cities’ where people want a few species of birds and animals to come back to the city, but at the same time, they want to rid the cities of the more pedestrian species.

CJ: One of the things I am trying to say more broadly is that many animals are not adapting to climate change, we are taking away their habitat and they are dying. However, some animals are adapting to climate change and living in urban settlements so there is this fork in the road where animals are either going to be unable to adapt to urbanisation and climate change and they are going to become increasingly endangered or extinct or they are going to learn how to live with people, more than they did before. In NY, we have coyotes living in all five boroughs. We’ve taken away enough of their native environment so now some of them are figuring out how to live in and among people. What I am saying with hybridity is that those of us who got used to the idea that the city is a place (which is for) humans and not animals--except in places like parks or in houses--better get used to pedestrian animals. Those that are going to make it through climate change and urbanisation, they are going to do it by getting better at living with humans.

Q: Where do you think the anger towards pigeons stems from?

CJ: I think they have been singled out, maybe next to rats as the biggest disease carriers. Of course, they carry diseases but so do other animals. They are seen as a vector. I don’t think people look at a sparrow and see a vector. The pigeons’ natural home was the rocky cliff-side, they prefer concrete to trees. It means that we view them as more annoying as trespassers. This is a generalisation but people kind of attach goodness to wild animals and see them as inherently more interesting, valuable, worth protecting. Because pigeons are the most urban, and most pedestrian, they are not even seen as real animals.