USELESS PIGEONS.

North Otago Times, 20 July 1917, Page 8

USELESS PIGEONS.

; WASTE OF GOOD FOOD. In a recent issue of "The Encing Pigeon," a small paper-published in London in,-the interest of pigeon fanciers, attention is drawn to the enormous quanity of good food that is consumed by ii useless class of bird, After pointing out. the importance' and Jhe value of the racing pigeon in war, the article says:— . • We have read—and must confess we were surprised to read—that large numbers''of fanciers and keepers of fancy pigeons, kept purely for a hobby, and without being of any State utility, use sometimes as much as two or three sacks of grain per week to feed these pigeons upon, • This is a very serious question, because breeders of these high-class fancy varieties are not justified in wasting corn in this manner. Ther is also another serious aspect of the question relative to the breeding of -short distance pigeons. Only recent-hi-the breeders of these li'mls endeavoured to show and prove that their pigeons were 1 useless for message work, hnd were of no danger to the State for spying purposes, : .as the majority of them could not fly more than a mile or ii mile and a half," and that they were purely bcrd for purposes of the sport of (lying,short distance races, •It has been pointed out from the figures given by those who press these claims that there are at the present time 250,000 owners and breeders of short distance pigeons in the country. The use of valuable grain to feed thesebirds on is a very important and serious question, the feeding of these birds on grain that may be required to feed birds for national purposes or may be a splendid substitute for other ,cereals for human consumption, must be seriously I considered.

Let us take the figures that are put before us by those advocating (he claims of the short distance breeders, They say that there are 2;i0,000 of these short distance livers, Accepting these figure? ns being correct, ami that the average number of birds owned and kept by these men is only twenty birds each, which would be a very small average, bearing in mind the number that are trained and the young birds that each loft would produce, we then have the figures that show that there are five millions of short distance pigeons owned by these men, and if we compute, which is a very low computation, and: really under the amount of food' that these birds would consume,) that each bird consumes one ounce of grain per day, short distance pigeons are being fed with live million ounces per day of valuable grain, This means ,15,000,000 uunccs per week will be consumed, equal to 2,187,5001b, or 19,ii31cwt per week. All of this is valuable grain that might be used as substitutes for other grain and for human consumption. The above figures show that a grain ration at the rate of 41b per head per ■week, for 546,57u persons, is being given to short distance pigeon owners to their birds.