Just as there are horse people and non horse people, the same can be said about birds. I come from a bird family. My father and brothers like to hunt them, my mother and I like them as pets. I remember having a hard time eating pigeon or duck or goose that somebody had shot, not just because I might bite down on some metal pellets from the shell and crack a tooth, or stab my mouth on a quill because my brothers
were fairly loose about the cleaning, but because I was eating on a plastic placemat that had colorful finches all over it with descriptions of each one that I had studied enough to have memorized. It seemed hypocritical.
I brought a pigeon home from the barn once, that was injured and couldn’t fly. I thought I would rehab him and take him back after he healed. Waldo (that’s what I named him) was quite agreeable to being tamed, and settled into our family with nary a look back at the stables. After all he got fed regularly, petted and held comfortingly, and the house was warm. Until one day when I held him up to my mother’s face, my fingers prying his feathers apart, and asked, “What’s that crawling around on his skin?” “Oh my god! He’s got lice!” she shrieked. She promptly dusted him in flea powder and made me take him out to the dog kennel to live. We had a big dog kennel and the sight of him pacing around it had even the dogs confounded. They would stand next to me and peer in at him with puzzled looks on their faces, heads cocked at the unnatural order of things. Waldo became so tame that when I let him out of the kennel he would follow me as I walked around the dumpster, along the gravel path on the side of the garage (by my favorite climbing tree), onto the covered walkway that linked the garage to the house, and in the back door to the kitchen, just like he was one of the dogs. I worried he was never going to fly again because he didn’t seem to feel the need.
However he did fly again, though not immediately through his own propulsion. My Dad was training one of his hunting dogs at the time, and he thought it was a great idea to use a live bird wrapped up in chicken wire to teach the dog to have a soft mouth and not mangle the birds they retrieve. He shot Waldo from a pop gun thirty yards down the lawn where he landed with a thump, bouncing and rolling a few more yards. The golden retriever sitting at my Dad’s left heel was quivering with excitement, waiting for his command. “Fetch!” he would yell, after making her wait for an interval. Meanwhile, Waldo was straight-jacketed inside some chicken wire, upside down, dazed from the flight and the landing. The dog would scamper down the lawn and grab him ever so gently in her mouth, because chicken wire would hurt if you closed your gums around it, and bring her prize back to my Dad, circling around his right side and coming to sit at his left heel again, waiting patiently with that poor bird hanging out of her mouth until my Dad said, “Drop it.”
I don’t remember giving my Dad permission to use Waldo as live bait, but when he unwrapped that bird from its wire corset, other than some dog drool dripping off his feathers, he seemed not only unharmed, but unperturbed. I suppose it’s highly possible that his IQ wasn’t high enough to warrant any distress. Thankfully the dog learned quickly and Waldo wasn’t tortured for long. His wing eventually healed enough that he could fly, somewhat erratically, but well enough that I took him back to the barn, somehow convinced by my mother that he was better off there, with other pigeons. I don’t think Waldo would have agreed.
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