People always think pigeons or doves are peaceful. They even refer to those who have milder or conciliatory attitude toward other people or nations as dovish. And they call those who are belligerent or militant hawkish. However, this concept may not be true. The truth may be just the opposite. At the place I work, there is a big cage outside the backyard. Actually you may call it a bird house which I think can content dozens of birds. When I was first assigned to this division, there were already two pigeons in the cage. One of them lost a wind, and the other got itself oily all over its body. And the reason for the grease is still unknown. And they cannot fly at all. According to what my boss had said, the one with its one wing severed was saved by him on a rainy and stormy afternoon. He was doing stuff in the office and then he heard a sound like there was something hitting on our satellite dishes which is one of our equipment on the roof. So then he climbed up to the roof and saw a pigeon lying on the ground, and one of its wings fell away from it. The wound was smooth that it was like being cut by a blade. My boss figured that this little poor creature was flying in the rain. And the vision was poor. And it flew by a guy that is used to stabilize our antenna. (A guy is a rope that you can always see for fixing a power pylon or an antenna.) Because of its speed, the rope severed its wing instantly. Fortunately, this bird didn’t die and got recovered in our cage. What is more, there is a little ring attached to one of its feet that shows that it was bred for racing. For the other greasy one, my boss said that on another rainy day, he found it cringing in front our front door with all over its body covered with oil. Its feather was just like a man’s hair that he didn’t wash it for ten years. Though it got two wings intact, it could not fly. And then here came the third pigeon which couldn’t fly either. So we kept three of them in the cage and bought food for them and hoped they could lead a happy life in the cage peacefully. For pigeons that can’t fly, being outside will soon kill them. Let me give three of them names so that later I can tell the story more easily. The first one is “One-arm”. The second one is “Oily”, and the third one is “Fat guy” ‘cause it is the biggest one. Not long after we adopted “Fat guy”, we discovered that Fat guy always bullies Oily. It pecks him, chases him and so on. So we then put him into an ordinary birdcage to quarantine it. Couple weeks later, we released it to give it a second chance to change itself and behave itself. However, it makes us very very disappointed about it. This morning, when I got out to give them some food, I found One-arm and Fat guy both bullying on Oily. This was not an ordinary bullying in the school. It was a crime in fact. One of Oily’s eyeballs was pecked out. There was nothing on one side of its face. And its “hair”, the feather on its head, was completely off. More than that, the scalp was off too. What left was just skull. It was a very cruel and gory sight. Strangely, there was no blood, but I would like to use the word “gory”. My heart sunk deep. I didn’t know the motive for that crime. There is plenty of food. I bet it is all because of the territory thing. Oily is still alive, I put it in a safe place. I hope there are no infections or anything like that to take away its life. I hope it will recover soon. I once read about an article saying that if two eagles or hawks fight for food or girlfriends or territory, though fierce they are, they won’t fight with each other to death, because they know that killing your rival would take too much energy and you would probably get hurt also. They will just scare away their competitors. There will always be a balance of terror among them. However if there are two pigeons fighting, it would like a fight of two gladiators in an arena. They will fight until one of them die, even though the winner will die later because of bleeding. So, next time when you see people release so-called “peace doves” on those ceremony such as national birthday or president inauguration or something like that, you may feel very ironic. --

※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 61.224.87.2 ※ 編輯: ayen1980 來自: 61.224.87.2 (06/30 22:08)