“But I see the Internet.” If you are a fan of the John Wick graphic novels and movies, you will recognize this line of dialog as one spoken by the Bowery King, Lawrence Fishburne, to The Adjudicator, Asia Kate Dillon, in John Wick 3: Parabellum. The king was referring to his pigeons – lovingly kept in a coop.
I read an interesting item a week or so ago about pigeons. In Austin, as in many cities, we have them living around buildings, in parking lots, under overpasses, and just about everywhere. They do not often visit my home, but several varieties of doves do – the white wing, collared, and Inca varieties.
Pigeons were brought to the New World from the Old where they were a cliff-dwelling species of dove. Here, they were domesticated and became a food source – squab. Later, chickens and other fowl replaced them at our dinner tables. They were used as mail carriers (the Bowery King’s reference to the Internet) for a time, only to be replace by the telegraph and later, the telephone. They were raced for sport, but the sport gave way to more brutal contests – brutal spectacle means so much more to us.
Pigeons, having outlived their novelty and usefulness, were ultimately turned out into the cold. Alas.
The pigeons adapted. They adapted to a diet based on humans’ refuse. Their cliff-dwelling ways adapted to urban infrastructure – buildings, highways, cell towers, electrical and communication wires. Now they flourish despite our neglect. Rather than live in forests or fields, they live in our cities.
The news item that I read lamented that humans had domesticated and exploited a species only to discard it in a manner so dismissively inhumane. I was unmoved. The history of humanity is one of inhumanity – to neighbors, to animals, to forests, to rivers, to oceans, to the planet itself. And I fully expect that when artificial intelligence becomes truly sentient, humanity will show it the same inhumanity that it has shown everything in the world including itself.
The only question that I have is, “Who will prevail in the final conflict?”