Rich Pell
This Is Not An Artifact
Berlin, Germany: K. Verlag, 2023
440 pp., 24 x 18 cm., hardcover
Edition of 1200
I was listening to a conversation today between Laurie Anderson and Paul Holdengräber, recorded a few months ago at Occidental College. At one point in their seventy-minute dialogue, Anderson picks up her phone and reads a message sent to her earlier that day, about pigeons. It was originally shared in a tweet (and not a hundred percent accurate) and it reminded me of the above book. Because since reading This Is Not An Artifact (and visiting the Pittsburgh museum that it documents), I find myself thinking about domesticity constantly.
The message is as follows:
"My friend grew up in New England where they have pigeons. Apparently they also hate them. He was always saying bad things about pigeons until I pointed something out that he never thought of before:
We domesticated pigeons. They are (nearly) all over the world because HUMANS BROUGHT THEM THERE. And, they were more than pets. They carried messages. People raced them. They lived spoiled lives as honored human companions for centuries.
Then we got telephones and we threw them out like trash.
Literally, we threw them away.
Their species had already been fully domesticated and they could not survive in the wild; they lost all their survival instincts during the centuries that they lived caged by people.
That is why they live in cities with people instead of in a forest somewhere. It's OUR fault. And not only did we throw them away, but now humans curse them as "winged rats;" casting them as pests.
But they don't know how to live without us, and their instincts tell us that they should trust us. So, they continue to come up to humans and beg for food, because it's the only survival skill left in their genes.
They love us because they were bred by us to feel that way, and yet we hate them.”
Brandon Turner, the lead author of a study done last year at The Ohio State University determined that pigeons are not merely highly intelligent, but that their problem-solving skills can be likened to AI. They employ a "brute force" method that is similar to what is used in Artificial Intelligence models. They are also highly adaptable, with more survival skills than the above text suggests.
They live in cities instead of forests because they do not eat bugs or fruit like other species of birds, but instead seeds and grain, which forests do not provide. They evolved on cliff sides and rock ledges not dissimilar to the concrete and stone found in urban areas.
Pell includes a half page about pigeons in This Is Not An Artifact:
"City pigeons are the ones who live in the nooks and crannies of our urban infrastructure. They eat from our discarded, or soon to be discarded, food. These are not the captive pigeons of the fancy breeders, or the homing pigeons who travel great distances, though those may be among their ancestors. The pigeons who fill our city squares are the descendants of the captive, domesticated, possibly fancy, pigeons. Either through escape or release, they are now free and feral.
“Whether feral, fancy or otherwise, pigeons are all descendants from wild rock doves who were domesticated as far back as 10,000 years in either Egypt or Mesopotamia. The rock pigeon is the oldest domesticated bird in the world. Their ability to adapt to the architecture of human civilization has severed them incredibly well. Pigeons are today the third most populous bird on the planet with a global population of approximately 475 million birds, the vast majority of which are the feral descendants of escaped domesticated pigeons. They are surpassed in number only by the domesticated chicken and the wild red-billed quell in Africa.”
My original post about the book is here:
I really can’t recommend it highly enough.
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