Serious suffering

Pigeons can suffer from poor living conditions in cities, facing starvation, diseases, injuries and high mortality rates, especially at high population densities. Populations of these birds can also cause problems for human communities through pollution by pigeon droppings and harassment. Thus, many municipalities impose feeding bans or even kill the animals. Depending on the respective legislation such measures violate animal protection laws, but this practice is also unethical and unsuitable to reduce pigeon populations in the long term. 

More and more cities are relying on the animal welfare-friendly birth control concept based on pigeon lofts with controlled feeding, as illustrated by the successful implementation of an overall concept from the “Management of City Pigeons in (large) Cities in Germany” handbook.

Animal-friendly solutions

This newly translated handbook explains the problems caused by urban pigeon populations and gives details on animal welfare-friendly solutions. Details for practical implementation, such as supervised dovecotes, their building and equipment, feeding and egg exchange are given. The topics of deterrence, feeding bans and animal-friendly deterrence measures to avoid wild nesting cells are covered, including an overview of the costs involved. Other chapters inform about different methods to measure the effectiveness of the concept, how to increase the chances of success and the best ways to intervene if problems occur.