Nice Seat, Where Can I Get One?

Reblog to give a nonbinary person a warm cup of soup.

Are fedoras really that bad?

YES YES THEY ARE

So I was told that Human Planet had a segment about pigeons in the Cities episode that I might be interested in and I was honestly so underwhelmed. I haven’t finished the episode so maybe there’s more pigeon stuff but I feel like all I saw was more Birds Of Prey Are The Only Cool And Acceptable Birds and pigeons are Trespassers In Our Urban World Who Shit On Everything And Are Useless On Top Of It. Which isn’t true and I’m so tired of this being framed as some horrible burden that humanity must face. Pigeons are the victims here, not us. 

Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs. 

Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.

We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).  My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.

It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.  

I just have a lot of feelings about how complex and multidimensional hating pigeons actually is

May the 10 of Pentacles bless your account with more money than you can spend. 💵✨

If you can’t reblog this, unfollow me now.

A new priest at his first mass was so nervous he could hardly speak. After mass he asked the monsignor for help. The monsignor replied, “When I am worried about getting nervous on the pulpit, I put a glass of vodka next to the water glass. If I start to get nervous I take a sip.”

So the next Sunday he took the monsignor’s advice. At the beginning of the sermon, he got nervous and took a drink. He proceeded to talk up a storm. Upon return to his office after mass he found the following note on his door:

Sip the Vodka, don’t gulp.

There are 10 commandments, not 12.

There are 12 disciples, not 10.

Jesus was consecrated, not constipated.

Jacob wagered his donkey, he did not bet his ass.

The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not referred to as Daddy, Junior, and the Spook.

David slew Goliath, he did not kick the shit out of him.

When David was hit by a rock and knocked off his donkey, don’t say he was stoned off his ass.

We do not refer to the cross as the Big T!

When Jesus broke the bread at the Last Supper he said, “Take this and eat it, for it is my body”, he did not say, “Eat me.”

The Virgin Mary is not referred to as the, “Mary with the Cherry”.

The recommended grace before a meal is not: “Rub-A-dub-dub, thanks for the grub, yeah God”

Next Sunday there will be a taffy-pulling contest at St. Peter’s, not a peter-pulling contest at St. Taffy’s.

Don’t refer to Jesus and the 12 disciples J.C. and the boys.

I want a dinosaur documentary series that has an episode called “T.rex has a nice day,” where instead of the standard Dino doc late cretaceous stuff (life or death fight with armored herbivore followed by death via apocalyptic meteor), the T.rex just has a nice day.  Wakes up, eats the carcass of yesterday’s kill, goes on a walk through their territory, drinks from a steam, walks some more, goes back to the kill for dinner, sleeps.  Just a pleasant day for T.rex.

Transgender Day of Visibility.