| Paul ShapiroSep 7 |
Thirty years ago, when I was 17, this photo was taken of me at the 1996 Labor Day pigeon shoot in Hegins, Pennsylvania.
The blood on my shirt came from a wounded pigeon I picked up. A spectator subsequently assaulted me while trying to take her from me; fans at the shoot preferred to rip the injured birds apart themselves for fun. (One spectator even entertained his friends by biting the head off a pigeon who’d been shot but wasn’t dead.) I was able to get the shot bird I picked up to a veterinarian, but her gunshot wounds ultimately proved fatal.
Today, for the first time in three decades I put on the same shirt again in that bird’s memory. I’ve never washed it, so her blood is still on the shirt.
I remain deeply grateful to my former long-time boss Heidi Prescott and to the many others (see here, here, and here as examples) who’ve devoted themselves to exposing and ending this cruelty. Heidi still works tirelessly to end the barbarity of pigeon shoots as a lobbyist in Pennsylvania.
But 30 years later, live-pigeon shoots are still held in Pennsylvania (here’s a club that regularly hosts them), the only state where they routinely occur. Captive birds are launched into the air and shot as living targets for entertainment.
An excellent book, Our Kindred Creatures, about the birth of the American animal protection movement, details how pigeon shoots were one of the top campaigns waged by animal advocates in the 19th century. In other words, animal protectionists have crusaded against this stain on humanity in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Yet like the bloodstain on my shirt, pigeon shooting still persists.
There’s just so much work for animals to be done. It’s time to ban pigeon shoots once and for all.
Exposing the Big Game 