“The Oaklander was unable to locate the pigeon for comment”
There are special oxygen masks for animals, which are designed to fit deeper over a snout or beak, and there are programs to donate sets to your favorite fire company. Back when I did this, masks came in three sizes: small (like for the size of birds or hamsters), medium (cats and rabbits), and large (large dogs). I liked making that contribution to my community :)
“Reminder that we domesticated pigeons and then abandoned them when they were no longer useful to us,” one user wrote. “This is literally the least we can do.”
This is inaccurate. We didn’t domesticate all pigeons (only fancy pigeons, not rock doves like you see in cities), and the ones that we did domesticate survive just fine. The rock dove succeeded so well in modern life because human society matches their natural environment so well: rocks (concrete) everywhere.
The rock doves living in cities today likely are feral descendants of domesticated rock doves. Their ‘fancyness’ wasn’t really useful for surviving and disappeared.
Feral descendants that bred with wild rock doves, incredibly unlikely to still be domesticated.
In much, maybe most of the current range, there were never truly wild rock doves for them to breed with, only feral domesticated pigeons.
I’m sure that there have been some cases of true wild rock doves accidentally or intentionally introduced to some areas, but in many more cases they’re just descended from domesticated pigeons that got loose or were released. Over many generations, sure, many of them have lost a lot of the domesticated traits that they were bred for but aren’t beneficial to life in the wild, but they’re still genetically distinct from truly wild rock doves (although it can get murky where to draw the line, because feral pigeons have also been interbreeding with wild birds in their native range for probably as long as they’ve been domesticated)
They survive just fine, but they were bred to like people and we’re treating them like shit.
They were not bred to like people. Snopes even has a whole article on it. https://web.archive.org/web/20260706224441/https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/pigeons-domesticated-instincts/
There are colonies of feral pigeons that don’t come into contact with humans anymore and they’re doing fine
