Comments on Alert PETA!

Too fucking ironic!

Hey! Maybe in an attempt at free publicity, the Game Companies are the ones behind the pigeon darting!

Or better yet... maybe some hard core gamer is just trying to get in a little practice before the game released?

hmmmm

I don't get why mocking protecting animals is such a deeply held editorial value of The Stranger.

The same was also possible with seagulls and the sniper rifle in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which was released in 2002. Move along, nothing to see here.

I don't get why protecting birds is such a big deal. Birds are the only thing you can kill for fun and laugh at. Who cares about fucking birds?

I agree with elenchos as usual. You guys are so smart about issues like the environment and public health until it gets in the way of frito pie and animal abuse.

I do not condone using darts to kill Pigeons but Pigeons are not ingenious to this continent anyway and carry some nasty diseases. More chickens are raised and slaughtered than pigeons are killed each day and not in a nice way. So culling pigeons seems like a good idea. Then you can go after Starlings and then Seagulls that survive in the thousands on garbage landfills we create, then shit on everything. There was not that many around before we came along just enough to survive in nature. We create situations where some animals breed out of control and we never do anything to correct the situation. We just look at them like they are cute Disney characters.
Someone using darts has a real hate on for these birds and a mental problem and should be dealt with. But to look at the out of control situation of some birds should be considered. We do it to rats and roaches and no one seems to care.

@5, The Stranger staff is smart about the environment and public health? I've never seen any evidence that their understanding of those issues goes beyond that of any asshole on the street.

@6, Shooting a few pigeons with evidently non-lethal but likely very painful blow darts isn't exactly controlling the pigeon population. No one is saying the pigeon population is fine as is, so you are just throwing up a red herring issue for the hell of it. Besides, I'm still calling BS on this over-population, horrible disease, talk. Sure, we created the environment in which they thrive, but we did that a very long time ago and everything is still OK. They haven't brought death and destruction upon the human race yet.

if it flies, it dies.

kill them before they kill you

- The more you know.

PSA from People Against Avian Bird Flu

Shooting a few pigeons with evidently non-lethal but likely very painful blow darts isn't exactly controlling the pigeon population.

I admit this probably isn't controlling the population in any noticeable way.

That said, why does everyone seem to assume these pigeons still walking around are the only ones that got a dart? I'm betting that for every darted pigeon that's still alive there were at least a few successful kills.

With brains that small, though, who knows. I do believe this was done to kill the animal. If you just want to torture pigeons, why shoot them in the place most likely to kill them?

If I had my way I'd just blow dart the idiots that feed the pigeons.

I'll start caring about a few people feeding pigeons if anybody can show me that the amount of birdseed scattered around town is more than a small fraction of the tons of garbage that people leave lying around.

There are intelligent ways to control pigeon populations, by the way. It doesn't require all this redneck engineering.

I prefer shotguns to blowguns.

But if you intend to eat them, a blowgun would work better ...

Yeah, that blow dart guy is doing a hell of a job hunting pigeons. What's his success rate? One out of five? If that.

At least in GTA4 the goal is to actually kill the pigeons.

Maybe it's harder than it looks.

Agreed with elenchos as well as cmaceachen's second point. I don't see the logic to blaming gulls, pigeons and starlings for the success they have as a result of human activity. Starlings are debatable, since they're an invasive species.

I'm just amazed at people who've enabled a species's success only to hate them for it. Yet the tears flow for the polar bear. The irony, it is thick.

The goal is 200 'winged rats' in GTA4