Wisestarfishtale - Untitled

since the old version of this post was flagged for ‘adult content’…

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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

when people ask where you see yourself in 10 years

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.

Reblog if you think asexuality is a legitimate sexuality.

I'm trying to prove something.

“Yes this LGBT mini-series “WHEN WE RISE” is a big deal AND there is no bisexual representation. The B is missing from this epic LGBT docu-drama. When LGBT people rose in San Francisco [and everywhere else], we rose together. Bisexuals worked shoulder to shoulder with Cleve Jones, Ken Jones, Roma Guy and Cecilia Chung whose lives are featured. This is not to take away from their incredible contributions; this is to point out what might not be noticed in the excitement of watching “When We Rise”. The suppression and silencing of bisexual contributions, history, and culture serves no one, especially our multi-generation LGBTQI community/movement. Williams Institute and Pew research among others show there are more self identified bisexuals than gay and lesbian people put together. Forty percent of self identified bisexual people are people of color. Bisexual suicide, depression, anxiety, domestic violence, rape, stalking, poverty, alcohol/drug/nicotine rates are higher than for gay, lesbian and heterosexual people. The ongoing casual and sometimes callous disregard of bisexual people and our lives is unacceptable and fueling a bisexual mental/physical health crisis. Excluding and isolating anyone in our community hurts all of us, especially in these dangerous times. What are you able to do to stand with and stand up for bisexual people and challenge biphobia, misinformation and ignorance – including perhaps your own?”

— Lani Ka’ahumanu, prominent bisexual activist and author  (via bisexual-books)

How did I understand this meme?

Me😰irl

Praying that $1500 randomly comes to you when you need it the most this year.