Lately I've been thinking about pigeons a lot. Pigeons, who were once revered and loved for their useful nature now discarded and forgotten or worse, cast as dirty beasts. Pigeons, that were promised security if they flew messages back and forth for their owner, only to have that security ripped from them as soon as technology passed the point of needing them. Pigeons, who gave up so much of themselves, gave up the instinct to hunt and nest and defend and migrate, all for the purpose we created for them, only to need to relearn all those lost instincts, at great peril and without any help, as soon as we deemed them as too much work with the 'better' options we had.
Pigeons that are now seen as nothing more than a nuisance to be avoided or at best, for children to feed with food they can't even digest. Pigeons that had been cared for for centuries only to have all of humanity turn their back on them in less than a lifetime.
Pigeons who turned themselves into our image of practicality and functionality to live alongside us, now forced to fly alone in the air we polluted, to float in the water we contaminated, to eat the scraps we tainted, to live in a world we decided didn't have a use for them.
I've been thinking about them, about how easily we did this to them, how easy it could be for something else to be disrupted and discarded just like the pigeon on the busy street corner next to my apartment with everything taken from them, not able to be a bird or a pet but forced to be something to stay alive, anything at all. I've been thinking about how cruel a world must be, how cruel people must be, to take away a role we crafted for them and then get mad at them for not having the knowledge we stripped from them.
I've just been thinking about pigeons a whole lot. I'm sorry pigeons, for my small part in crafting your downfall, even without meaning to. I'm sorry for how I can't be enough to change peoples minds on you. I'm sorry for every way we should have been better to you. I'm just so sorry.
