How Humanity Gave This Animal the Middle Finger

oh my God what is that oh my God what is that no way kill this [Music] fidget you definitely know who this is and why he was an icon but did you know there were at least two creatures that khaki animal Jesus was afraid of one hippos no further explanation needed but also parrots yeah the same Steve Irwin that cuddled crocodiles got a hickey from a python on live TV and apologized to the python and did this was the same man that experienced legitimate fear in the face of an overgrown parakeet and the crazy part is that has nothing to do with this video I really only brought that up to make my biggest fear sound less ridiculous cuz out of all the animals in the world I've historically only been afraid of one I've held 8ft pythons when I was six I've had no problems with the spiders in my house I've always had a soft spot for sharks yet the one animal that could stop me dead in my TR matter of fact just guess what do y'all think I'm about to say here's an ad while you grapple with that pigeons it's always been pigeons I could never fully explain it but as early as I can remember these bumdes put the fear of Dante's Inferno in every fiber of my vessel there's two stories that sum up my feelings towards pigeons as a kid I could vaguely remember crossing the street with my dad when one of the spawns of Aven Antichrist popped out from under the car like a Five Nights at Freddy's jump scare and from the way my dad likes to tell this story apparently I coiled so bad that I jumped back and nearly got turned into a speed bump by a passing van there is an alternate universe where my irrational fear of pigeons cost my folks in dependence and had me have encent so this is really more exposure therapy than an actual video and the first step is understanding there are a lot more types of pigeons that my subconscious could ever curse me with there's over 350 pallets of pigeons populating the planet you got the Victoria crowned pigeon the biggest bird on the roster whose headdress got it named after royalty then there's the naikar the closest thing to to a present day dodo and definitely the hype Beast flexor of the family can't forget the kururu the New Zealand variant famous for being a crippling alcoholic as in they'll get so hammered off fermented fruit that they legit forget how to fly and you've probably heard the phrase turtle dove especially this time of year well today I found out that I apparently had no clue what they look like or that they originated from the Middle East a hop skip in an 8- hour flight to the Philippines and you'll find a l on bleeding heart pigeon named for obvious reasons you got the Silvery wood the maroon pigeon and the purple Wing dove all of which are in danger of being discontinued and then you got the pigeons humans bred like dogs which would easily make this the Pug of poultry it's like a pigeon police sketch done by a kindergartener on Aderall with no prior knowledge of anything bird there's hundreds of breeds of pigeons and the English powder might just be the nastiest work of all although the English carrier might just be a close second because honestly what in the what what what even is this what was the goal if this was the outcome all those pigeon remixes go back to the OG The Rock Dove aka the main mug shot that comes up when you Google pigeon and this is where I stopped hating and started learning for example The Rock Dove was originally only found here well well actually here in the dark red that's right any place outside this red is a place people Uber the scourge of my soul that includes what might as well be the pigeon capital of the world New York city so of course I just had to grow up 15 minutes from it cuz RNG apparently pigeons first touched American soil in the early 1600s via Europeans that means the flying City Merchant is more natural to the Sahara Desert than to the streets of Manhattan which brings me to half the reason I'm making this video what's the one thing you spend way too much time thinking about I think all the time about how we domesticated pigeons and then we decided we don't want to use them anymore for like messages so they are completely reliant on humans they have you ever seen like a nest of a pigeon no and I didn't know we domesticated them either yeah they like nests are like three twigs and like the egg is just on the cold ground so cuz they don't know how to build a nest because we messed them up yeah I did not know how to take this Revelation and after looking into it she's half right pigeon Nest is a meme as old as time there's really something only an animal with no access to birth control could come up with it's heavy on the them kids but before they're even born at this point it's like they're trying so hard not to try that it would literally take less effort to try the thing is they weren't named Rock Dove for nothing in the wild they normally rais their aesthetically challenged children on Cliff leges or crevices which ended up being not that far off from where they shack up now and as long as the ground's flat and the Egg doesn't roll away to become a late termination and an early onset omelet this is really all they need minimalism for the win but the other point she made about us pretty much abandoning them turns out it's pretty accurate which actually brings me to my second story so I had spent the day walking around New York with my mom and was understandably starving so hungry that we decided to get food from a Streetside meat vendor the cardinal sin of the city but we didn't know any better the food was immediately off but let's be honest not enough for me to stop I remember the meat tasting gamey and fatty and had this really strong aftertaste that I'd never experienced before it wasn't until I was 2/3 done that I noticed a small cage halfway tucked under the stand a small cage with maybe a dozen pigeons squirming around it was at this moment I realized I was sold a chicken leg lie your boy just ate some pigeon wings now that story is almost completely made up but peep out just the idea of getting calories from a concrete chicken probably disgusted most of y'all the thing is pigeons are regularly eaten by people in a lot of places squab is a name for immature prepub best in domestic pigeon and is considered a delicacy depending on where you're standing which shouldn't even really be a surprise because one thing about pigeons they get violated by the entire food chain I've seen with my eyes pigeons get absolutely bodied by a street Savvy Stewart Little they somehow managed to find ways to take L's from turtles in fact there's a catfish that specializes in mky an animal that literally got GIF WRA the ability to fly and to add insult to injury the fish is virtually blind how do you fumble that bad pretty much the entire cast of over the the Hedge plays population control for pigeons and we've all seen how Pelicans conduct themselves in Pigeon presence and humans were no different and food was one of the many reasons pigeons were added to the American census another reason was to employ them as Messengers before iPhone became a thing but another reason was for pets there was a time where owning a pack of pigeons wasn't just normal it was a sign of status if you had pigeons on your property it meant you were probably doing well in life akar the great of the mugle Empire had not one but 2,000 pigeons as at as wow that is a comma make that 20,000 pet pigeons but in a time since hoarding pigeons went from a flex to something that guarantees you dirty looks on the subway and that's thanks to one of the most egregious Gaslight campaigns you've ever seen in June 1966 New York Parks commissioner Thomas hoving verbally eviscerated pigeons blaming them for spreading filth and disease and used a term you've definitely heard of rats with wings and just like that the pigeon's reputation went straight to hell no return trip a couple things that are interesting though in the same article Mr hoving also blamed the homeless and homosexuals for bringing property value down he also became the commissioner January 16th 1966 and resigned March 15th of the next year his actual term was just over a year but the slander he tagged the Metro Tweety with was permanent then Woody Allen dog piled on them and Humanity has hated pigeons ever since it's not pretty at all there rats with it's kind of like how Mark Twain roasted coyotes so flagrantly not only did it single-handedly earn them smoke from the public it was directly responsible for the luckless Looney Tune that's not a throwaway joke either look up what Wy coyote was based on it's actually wild but thanks to these three words the bird that was more common in royalty than marrying your cousin got typ cast as a flying version of the animal whose hygiene allegedly turned half the population into a hashtag I got to say allegedly because new evidence suggests that rats weren't even responsible for the plague to begin with why the you lying pigeons got lied on too because they're nowhere near the disease risk we labeled them as and I legitimately didn't know that before researching they can carry disease but because of their immune system it's actually rare for them to transmit them to people I know I couldn't believe it either it also turns out the glorified gutter Tweety is actually resistant to bird flu now they still can catch you slipping and usually the problems come from their lesser half when pigeons drop deuces in one spot it can dry up and eventually turn into dust breathe enough of that doooo dust and you can end up with a nasty infection known as bird Handler's lung but even then it takes a lot like some you clean birch as a hobby for you to be exposed enough to be down bad so yeah pigeons carry diseases but no more than any other animal I mean by that logic humans carry disease but we're still out here raw dogging handshakes dogs can carry disease yet I still see people tongue kissing them deer are walking airbnbs for ticks pedaling lime disease and cats done infected half the people watching this yet pigeons are the ones that got tattooed as rodents with frequent flyer miles between 1941 and 2003 there have been 176 documented cases of pigeons passing off the disease to a human and again it' virtually take you being buddy from that one Hey Arnold episode you know what else I found out pigeons don't really spill sugar honey iced tea while flying they 100% can but since that could involve hitting their own feet they prefer to do it on a perch so it turns out the dirtiest thing about pigeons is the way we've done them which actually sucks because once I started to work past my pigeon Prejudice I realized I can't believe I'm about to say this pigeons are lowy broken like they're mad talented for no reason like for example they're one of the fastest things with wings in the world World pigeons can fly at averages of 60 MPH but can peek out at nearly 100 there have even been stories of pigeons triggering speed cameras in streets we don't really notice because one of their biggest Ops also happens to be the fastest thing alive which is how they can get packed up by a 200 m per hour Falcon Punch but pigeons still have the juice to dodge a paragan and live to talk about it put it this way the fastest thing on earth hunts pigeons and even that's not a total mismatch and a good reason is another superpower we don't talk about their eyes the only real self-defense pigeons practice is the power of foresight so if they don't see danger coming or Worse don't recognize it they just get bullied but pigeons have 340° vision and can even see wavelengths of light invisible to us they're so busted that the US Navy Once Upon a Time tried using the chicken of the city to conduct search and rescue missions out in the ocean basically they trained a couple pigeons to recognize random red or orange objects you know the colors you'd expect from a life jacket and then press or more like peck on a switch on site in test runs the pigeons noticed a Target 90% of the time completely outclassing the human rescue crew who just barely pulled off 40% then there's the fact that the pigeons could remain vigilant for hours without falling off unfortunately the experiment was cut short due to budget cuts and every pigeon involved getting killed during a crash landing but even this experiment showcased another pigeon Flex they're way smarter than they get credit for they probably would if they could talk like parrots or Ravens but even with a brain in the weight class of a walnut pigeons can still surprise us trained pigeons can actually pass the mirror test the same one most dogs and cats fail in 1995 a study found that pigeons could be taught to tell the difference between a Picasso painting and Monae I'm not going to lie to you I myself can't do that to a similar beat pigeons could be trained to tell apart malignant breast tumors from the benign and yeah yeah we're still talking about a bird here a German study in 1990 found that the Aven overachievers could successfully memorize 725 different black and white patterns and correctly identify the 100 patterns associated with a reward pigeons also have an ability to count that Rivals primates bro tell me why folks found out that the bane of Broadway can read so what scientists did right they taught these pigeons a bunch of words and would either show a real word on screen or a misspelled one to go with a star if it was an actual word like for example dog they had to Peck at the word and if it was some nonsense like ug the rules were a peck at the star get it right and they'd win food tell me why the feathery assault on your windshield actually did better than the bad Boons that took the same test it was at this moment I went from highly impressed to low-key concerned with how smart pigeons are there's like 5 million of them in NYC we're cooked if they turn on us here's a couple other pigeon facts I picked up that thing they'll do where they'll fly around in a circle as a synchronized group that has a name and it's called murmuration the best theory for why they do this is as a predator response because their honest to God best defense is just making it harder to be singled out that weird crusty looking bump on their beaks is called the operculum and it's really only there to cover the nostrils and like a middle-aged hairline it slowly starts to disappear as they get older pigeons are also monogamous and one of the minority of birds that take till death seriously that's probably why you've never seen a baby pigeon parents supervised them virtually 24/7 until they look like the urbanite we're used to pigeons are as loyal as birds get so it's no surprise they've had success in the military this is Sher Ami one of the many homing pigeons used by the US during World War I and in 1918 over 500 men got pinned Behind Enemy Lines with no food water or ammunition their only option was releasing carrier pigeons begging for support but the surrounding Germans peep game and started lighting up any pigeon that tried and that included she Ami who got shot out of the air but like a goddamn Phoenix managed to get back up against every force of nature the Plucky pigeon made it back to base traveling a smooth 25 mil and 25 minutes to deliver the message that would end up saving the remaining 194 men and he did it half blind with a bullet wound and a leg hanging on by a literal thread the bird whose name me my dear friend past tense later the next year but would be forever immortalized in the Smithsonian as the MVP of the 77th infantry GI Joe was a homing pigeon who came in clutch when he delivered a message calling off an air strike of a village that the British had already regained control of from the Germans if GI Joe didn't basically score at the buzzer at least 1,000 soldiers would have been turned into ashes and then there was William of Orange who travel 250 mi in just over 4 hours to request air support after the radio sets had failed turned out he was the air support and Williams carry job saved about 2,000 men he would be one of the 32 pigeons to earn the dickin award which was basically like a Finals MVP but for Animals somehow pigeons went from war heroes to people actively trying to wipe them out we really stay doing our troops wrong but I think it's safe to say I was wrong I was not familiar with their game you won't catch me moving like this guy but I'll definitely respect them just from a reasonable distance and that's the most character development you're going to get drink water hug you're loved tell the pigeon you appreciate them and I'm going see y'all in the next one [Music] [Music] animal s

Channel: Casual Geographic

Views: 2,096,860

Keywords: video, sharing, camera phone, video phone, free, upload

Id: Y3kwJSEdCWQ

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2023