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I feel very strongly that pigeons are beautiful birds and that we take them for granted.
(hexbear.net)
They are the proletariat of birds
I strongly agree! They have such delicate grey pattern, plus these iridescent feathers, and these orange eyes... I've been trying to tell people that and I was appalled to see they didn't seem to undertsand what I was saying. In one specific instance, I was pointing at the pigelon and saying "Look, isn't it beautiful? See these patterns? See this rainvow on its collar?" and the guy just said "I don't know, it's just a pigeon" . I'm starting to think many people don't actually look at pigeons. They don't see their shape their feathers or their colors. They quickly identify it as a pigeon, and immediately attach to them all the ideas they've been learning to attach to them : Dirty, invasive, pests... It's like their not seeing an image, just a whiteboard with a bunch of words, attached to more words. Like these overly labelled comics, but only the labels. They look at things and identity them, but don't see them.
Yeah, I think it's the same for a lot of common animals. In the UK people couldn't give a shit about mice, rats, squirrels, pigeons but whenever I see one I make sure to point it out to my son and watch them for a while.
There's something about the way people see nature when it's categorized as a pest or nuisance.
Weeds are only designated such because of the aesthetics around landowning, lawns and 'tamed' land.
It's a really depressing, but salient phenomenon because then people without lawns start to value their aesthetics and suddenly care about pests.
And this sort of logic can be directed at anything or anyone.