Members of the royal family are no strangers to the enjoyment of extreme animal cruelty – their patronage of various wildlife organisations is a smokescreen of course. See Animal Trust and Animal Wild. A letter from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) highlights their abuse of pigeons. Three, from King Charles’ Sandringham loft, bred for racing, were bought by PETA at auction in February 2024 in order to rescue them.
Pigeon racing, like all forms of animal racing, just seems deeply weird to me as well as completely uninteresting and pointless. PETA wrote to King Charles asking him to end “his association with the archaic pastime”.
In 2020, Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, aka Windsor, that surname, taken from the name of the castle, adopted only in 1917 by George V to disassociate the family from Germany because of the First World War, wife of the notorious tiger killer Philippos Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, aka Mountbatten, that name change taking place before his marriage to the queen, sent eight birds to South Africa to take part in the ‘South African Million Dollar Pigeon Race”. All of them died during the quarantine period, most likely through stress. Before that she had sent 42 pigeons to South Africa over six years, of which just five survived.
Casualty rates during the races are very high, but some very odd people seem to find the whole thing entertaining, and of course there’s money involved. Pigeons’ navigational skills are exploited – they have so much to contend with en route: “storms, exhaustion, disorientation, starvation, predation, and collisions with power lines”, but they are just trying to find their way home, whence they have been abducted and transported for no justifiable reason.
The photograph shows Wood Pigeons in my garden.
Leave a Reply