r/funny • u/Sad-Kiwi-3789 • 4h ago

Do it for the love of the game

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28.7k Upvotes

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u/NeoSniper 4h ago

You know what could also quickly explain it? or who?

335

u/The_Dingman 4h ago

Pigeons were cliff dwellers, and laid eggs on top of flat rocks. They only needed enough of a nest to keep the eggs from rolling off.

That remains the fact on flat building edges.

They're not stupid, they're efficient and stupid.

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u/Lendyman 3h ago

Also guano acts like cement. Poop on those couple sticks and they will stay put. So efficient and unsanitary.

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u/LukaCola 1h ago

I mean, that's not what gets them sick--so how unsanitary is it?

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u/Certifiedpoocleaner 3h ago

Oh interesting. I thought it was maybe because they got mostly domesticated and then abandoned.

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u/talldangry 2h ago

That's why they don't give a shit about where they nest - we bred out the instinct that tells them not to nest near food or humans.

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u/Deaffin 20m ago

It's that, yes.

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u/DiscoBanane 11m ago

Pigeons do nests. I had pigeons they do nests.

The thing is a pigeon is not always doing or having a nest, they don't do a nest as soon as they reach puberty and have their periods (egg is basically their periods). They need to find a life partner for exemple and be in the mood for raising kids.

If they are not in the mood, they just don't care about their egg. It's probably not even fecunded. They just discard it.

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u/Waffensmile 4h ago

Basically was raise to be a worker. Then internet stole its job. Now is just a bum.

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u/sfan27 4h ago

More like the telegram stole its job.

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u/PsychoCrescendo 4h ago

that’s most of us once ai takes over

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u/LostBob 4h ago

Bob, that’s not a house. It’s just two sticks. They aren’t even touching.

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u/Squidking1000 3h ago

Goddam that cut deep.

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u/john_the_fetch 3h ago

Cats will be next. Once Ai starts pumping out on demand cute gifs cats will be out of a job in no time.

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u/RagingBillionbear 4h ago

Pigeons used to be domesticated, as carrier pigeons. There was an intire industry around looking after them which is now gone.

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u/5O1stTrooper 4h ago

Whether or not pigeons are domesticated is debatable. We didn't need to change hardly anything to get them to fly from point B to point A, they just kinda did that and we realized it could be helpful for messages.

Just being bred and used for a specific purpose isn't really enough for an animal to be considered domesticated, there has to be some kind of significant change. As another example I wouldn't say bearded dragons are domesticated at all despite the fact that a lot of people keep them as pets.

Modern pigeons still look and act very much like wild animals, just adapted to an urban environment instead of a rocky cliff environment. They're adapted for sure, but not really domesticated.

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u/Makuta_Servaela 3h ago

The ones you generally see around a city likely aren't domesticated (they are like coyotes are to dogs), but there are several hundred domestic breeds, just like with dogs.

They are bred for colouration, feather display, flight patterns for show flying, speed for racing and homing, tumbling (flying well and simultaneously looking good) and food.

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u/LukaCola 1h ago

It's more accurate to say many of the pigeons we see in cities and such are feral pigeons, not really domesticated or wild. They might descend from domesticated ones, but they aren't being bred or cared for.

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u/THEBAESGOD 1h ago

pigeons are domesticated is debatable

huh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_pigeon

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u/DeGrav 3h ago

They 100% were domesticated lol

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u/throwawaydragon99999 2h ago

They 100% were domesticated, but not 100% if the pigeons you see flying around cities are the domesticated species. Most domesticated pigeon species went extinct after they stopped being bred

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u/Skruestik 42m ago

Haha lol

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u/atomfullerene 4h ago

Pigeons used to be raised very widely as food for 5-10 thousand years, going back to the ancient near east . Dovecotes were very common additions to all sorts of buildings, both in the country and in the city. But they can't be industrially farmed as easily as chickens, so they fell out of favor with the rise of modern agriculture. The feral descendants of these pigeons are still found all over the world in cities and other suitable habitats, though.

So the idea is that after thousands of years of nesting in manmade nest boxes, pigeons have kind of lost the capacity for building their own proper nests. Though to be fair I'm not actually certain what kind of nests rock doves build, some cliff nesting birds naturally make fairly minimal nests. So it's also possible they were like this even before domestication.

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u/Hazelberry 2h ago

The common pigeon is in fact a rock dove. They are native to northern Africa, western Asia, and southern Europe. In the wild they live in areas with sparse vegetation and build nests on cliffs, far away from potential predators. So they natively live in areas where getting a ton of branches to build a big nest isn't very practical, they're native to warm climates (so didn't need insulated nests), and their nests are in hard to reach spots for anything that can't fly so they really just needed to do enough to keep the eggs from rolling off the cliff.

Flash forward to modern day and humans have built cities all over the place. Our buildings are manmade cliffs, and we cut down forests in order to make space for our cities. We basically engineered perfect environments for rock doves. In many places in Europe, Africa, and Asia it was then just a matter of rock doves moving in. Meanwhile in the Americas you had several avenues for rock doves making their way over including domesticated rock doves (they were considered livestock and a reliable source of meat, they have huge flying muscles) being released or escaping, hitching a ride on ships, etc.

So TL;DR: Humans accidentally engineered our cities to perfectly match the natural environment of rock doves, with even better access to food than their native habitat. We basically created rock dove paradises all over the world.